Manufacturing Champions (Part 2)
The Challenge of Conceptual Inertia
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“Goals are for people who care about winning once.
Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly."
James Clear
This is going to be an evergreen series of essays that connects several concepts I’ve shared before while also serving as a foundation for future posts. It’s my thesis on the shared, but latent, north star of any B2B product company. Check out Part 1.
In the prior post in this series, I laid out the case for Manufacturing Champions - the idea that you need a playbook for regularly and reliably creating advocates for your product who can drive current user adoption and generate future customer pipeline. Said another way, if you are manufacturing champions, then you have a growth loop.
In this essay I want to delve more into why this approach isn’t more prevalent across B2B product companies. Because intuitively the concept resonates - why wouldn’t EPD and GTM collaborate on turning users and buyers into evangelists? Why wouldn’t a product team accept the gift of a power user helping drive adoption? Why wouldn’t a sales team take advantage of a insider helping drive account expansion. Why wouldn’t a design team lean on an early adopter to provide feedback on concepts? Why wouldn’t a marketing team let an influencer serve as a reference to generate leads?
Champions are essential to the product lifecycle from an EPD perspective and instrumental to the distribution playbook from a GTM lens. But this idea of coordinated collaboration between the 2 orgs being the more important flywheel at a company is not the prevailing wisdom of the day. How come?
Because of a powerful but invisible force at work across companies: conceptual inertia.
What is conceptual inertia? It’s the tendency of a system (like say a B2B company) to reject any newfangled ideas until the pressure mounts to fundamentally rethink things (like say stalled growth).
It’s not simply that there is a lack of awareness about a concept - the inertia extends into considering it, discussing it, implementing it, learning it, and evangelizing it. Think about how long it takes for an ritual from a fast-growing company to get disseminated. Think about how difficult it is to get basic tooling deployed. Think about how the implementation of universally-accepted best practices is fought tooth and nail in organizations that are struggling to scale.
To test out this idea, I polled folks on LinkedIn to see what operating models that everyone knows should be used sit in the learning rituals backlog and on the change management shelf. Some of the stuff that came up included the following:
everyone wants to use data to make decisions…but they struggle to do it
everyone knows talking to customers is high ROI…but they still skip that step
everyone feels the qualtity cost of rushed releases…but they happen all the time
everyone has been burned by building one-off features…but it keeps happening
everyone knows you need tailor messaging across channels…but we still duplicate
you can see a longer, crowd-sourced laundry list of issues in this LinkedIn post
And this is just the stuff everyone knows better about. What about the emerging frameworks and nascent principles that haven’t even been blogged about or mentioned on a podcast? We’re so adept at ignoring documented knowledge, we have yet to make it to the learnings that are trapped in the brains of folks pushing the boundaries of EPD and GTM teams.
So is it all doom and gloom? No - and I’ll tell you why. There are 3 things to keep in mind if you’re intrigued by the possibility of rejiggering your EPD and GTM orgs around the manufacturing champions concept:
1. There are success stories you can point to that appear with different terminology, and that is critical in getting “the powers that be” to consider enacting a change
2. A lot of best practices that aren’t widely adopted or stuck in transition purgatory end up that way because the host environment rejects the transplanted process
3. The essence of manufacturing, which entails automating the production of something with quality controls and volume guarantees, is a unique assembly line
Let me elaborate on each of these points.
On [1], you may have never heard it referred to as manufacturing champions, but this concept has been around to power growth and scale for many companies. Many PLG companies with a self-serve motion have 1 Growth leader straddling marketing and product, because they understand the lifecycle of customer acquisition, activation, monetization, and retention needs to be tight-knit. But the idea of a Growth leader spanning EPD and GTM is not limited to a PLG context - it’s just not that common outside it. Many Enterprise companies have a GM that owns both R&D and the book of business, because they understand the need to unify development and commercialization under 1 executive. But the need for a directly responsible individual like a GM isn’t isolated to Enterprise companies - it’s just not caught on beyond that segment. The point I’m making is people have organized around the north star of manufacturing champions before, but it’s not clicked for everyone that this model might actually make sense for them too.
On [2], I have great news. Let’s start with why many transformation efforts die - because the system wants to stay in stasis and rejects the intervention. For example, your org never look at metrics, new leader comes in and wants to see weekly metrics, 18 months of arguing about the state of your data pipeline later, you have a dashboard no one uses with some vanity metrics. There are similar stories for user research, release management, demand generation, etc. So why would something as foundational as manufacturing champions catch on? Because if you’ve managed to create any kind of viable company, product, and motion, then you’re already doing it. You’re just doing it with a lot of friction and fumbling. Think of it as operationalizing what you’re already doing as a business to acquire and retain customers, without any of the cruft, the distractions, the roadblocks, etc. When you try and roll out a new operating model oriented around manufacturing champions, you’ll find you’re speaking to a captive audience of employees who already have the cogs lined up to get the machine humming. In short, some assembly required, but you’re not going against the grain.
On [3], when you set out to manufacture champions, you’ll discover that the ingredients and recipe are unique to your company and approach. You won’t be able to copy/paste someone else’s approach to manufacturing, because you don’t source your parts from the same places, you don’t assemble things in the same way, and your customers don’t come to you because they want the same widget. If you’re truly being asked by your prospective customer base to literally build something that looks and feels like a competitor’s product, just slightly more polished or at a reduce price point, then shut down assembly; you are in a commoditized category and in a shrinking market. But if you’ve truly tapped into growing demand with a differentiated offering, then streamlining getting product into the hands of a primed audience and leveraging those reference-able logos to create the next wave of demand is the best thing you can do for your company. And because you won’t want, need, or be able to replicate your competition, you’ll come up with your own distinctive flavor of EPD and GTM organization and collaboration.
So, to recap, manufacturing champions is a highly attractive and potentially lucrative idea that hasn’t (yet) gone mainstream due to conceptual inertia - but there is hope on the horizon because ultimately this operating model leans into enhancing what is working for a company and will resonate with the employee base that is the true execution engine of the org.
In the next post in this series, I’m going to spend some time exploring the realities of how most EPD and GTM orgs are structured and incentivized and how a motivated leader might steer their company towards a more collaborative model. Until then, you can re-read Part 1.
As always, I’d also love to hear from readers about their approaches to manufacturing champions and overcoming conceptual inertia - please chime in via comments👇 or join the chat via the Substack app.
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further reading / references
In Part 1 of Manufacturing Champions, I enumerate the symptoms of misaligned EPD and GTM teams and highlight the power of a unified approach
I’ve hinted at manufacturing champions before - it’s a critical step in both landing deals and moving upmarket
Repeatability as the key to scaling in B2B SaaS is something I expand on in Consumerizing Enterprise == Loop Sequencing
when a company attempts to copy/paste rituals from another environment, usually via a transplanted leader, it results in Cargo Culting Culture, which tends not to work
one reason why organizational transformation is so hard is the anti-pattern of New Toolkit, Old Mindset, which requires proper change management to counter
childish drawing / interpretation
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