Commercialization: A Missing Kind of Product Ownership

Product Management, Commercialization, and Revenue Enablement are too disjointed.
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Great product-led companies don’t just build good software. They build organizations that can consistently turn product capability into commercial reality.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it’s rare.

What usually happens instead is that responsibility for commercial success fragments across functions. Product owns delivery. Marketing owns messaging. Finance owns pricing. Sales owns execution. Enablement, sales ops, and various GTM functions sit in between, translating and coordinating after the fact.

Collectively, they create a system where no one fully owns the thing that actually matters: whether the product can be understood, justified, sold, and expanded in the real world.

I want to argue for a different ownership model. One where product teams, or more specifically an individual embedded within the product org, take responsibility not just for shipping features, but for enabling the commercial success of what they build. Not through better handoffs or tighter alignment, but through direct ownership of commercialization as product work. This is a role I’ve played many times as an “enablement leader”, and when it’s happened it’s led to the most successful commercialization efforts and product launches that I’ve ever experienced.

The Structural Gap Most Companies Gloss Over

Many product-led companies have a structural gap, and foolishly rely on GTM enablement teams to fill it.

Engineering builds powerful capabilities. Sales is asked to sell outcomes. A growing set of functions sit in between, translating after the fact. Enablement, PMM, sales ops, pricing committees, launch rituals.

Enablement teams, where I’ve spent 15 years of my career, are by design and at best amplifiers. They do not own the product, the business outcome, or the customer problem end to end, yet they are often made the internal mouthpiece for all of it. The work optimizes for awareness, coverage, and coordination, not depth, judgment, or sustained ownership. Over time, this produces a function that is pseudo-fluent in academic literature on learning theory but underpowered, if not altogether incompetent, in product, customer, and economic understanding.

This is not a critique of enablement people. It is a critique of a system that keeps asking downstream functions to compensate for upstream ambiguity.

And enablement is not the only place this shows up. PMM is often asked to invent coherence after the product is built. Finance is asked to rationalize pricing disconnected from lived customer value.

The problem is plural. Enablement just happens to be where the pain concentrates most visibly.

Commercialization Is a Product Problem

Recently, the operating model of the best and fastest growing start-ups has shifted.

The strongest organizations are led by engineering and product teams who own outcomes, not just execution. Product is increasingly responsible for business impact, not just roadmaps. Selling, true selling and not just transacting, is not isolated to sales. It is a necessary part of the Product Management function, and something the best engineering leaders do as well.

If product owns outcomes, then product must own the conditions required for those outcomes to exist.

Commercialization cannot remain a downstream activity. It cannot be treated as a GTM afterthought, or something other teams clean up once the feature ships. When no one owns commercialization as part of product work, it fragments across roles that cannot see the whole.

Too often, PM work stops when the feature is shipped. That’s a mistake. Customers don’t buy features. They buy a solution to a problem, wrapped in terms they can understand, justify internally, and pay for.

In the best product-led companies, the work doesn’t stop until a seller can explain why it matters, a buyer understands what problem it solves, procurement can evaluate what they’re paying for, and the account can expand without renegotiating reality six months later.

If those things are not true, the product is not finished.

Product Management Is Revenue Enablement

I’m not advocating for another Product or GTM role. I’m arguing for what product ownership actually means, and for putting the right ownership in place for startups and scale-ups to be successful.

If you want to build a product-led company, one that creates products people genuinely want, trust, and are willing to pay for, then responsibility for that success must live, or at least be deeply embedded, in the product and engineering organization.

At its core, this responsibility is to ensure the successful commercialization of the product.

It requires owning a deep, sustained understanding of customer pain, constraints, and value drivers. Not through surveys or generic market research decks, but through direct engagement with customers, deal analysis, and post-sale learning. Someone must be accountable for saying “this is the problem we are solving” in language a user, buyer, and internal stakeholder would recognize, and for closing the loop between what is built, what is sold, and what actually wins and creates lasting value. It also means owning how product capabilities become sellable offers. Packaging, pricing models, monetization programs, and offering design that reflect customer value rather than internal abstractions. The body of work is not shipping features. It is building solutions that can be explained, priced, defended, and expanded.

It also means producing canonical value narratives that sales can actually use and engineering can build toward. These are not training assets. They are product artifacts. If sales misunderstands the product, that is not a training gap. It is a product failure. Training is an implementation detail.

And it means revenue accountability. Not quota carrying, but real responsibility for adoption, deal quality, pricing integrity, expansion paths, and time to value. Success must be measured in outcomes, not activity metrics.

This is what it looks like when product ownership extends all the way to outcomes.

Pricing: The Most Obvious Practical Example

Pricing is where organizational abstraction collapses.

You cannot hide behind language, frameworks, or training when a customer is deciding whether something is worth paying for. That’s why pricing and packaging work tend to expose structural flaws faster than almost anything else.

In more than one company, while formally leading enablement, I was pulled directly into pricing and packaging work. Not as a courtesy. As a necessity.

Sales struggled to explain value cleanly. Discounting became the default lever. Pricing exceptions piled up. Enablement was asked to train harder. New decks were created. New messaging frameworks rolled out. The confusion persisted.

The inflection point came when responsibility shifted from explaining pricing to owning it end to end.

Once embedded directly in pricing and packaging decisions, and accountable for how those decisions performed in the real world, everything changed. Feedback loops tightened. Alignment improved. We could run deliberate experiments in live deals, learn what worked, and adjust quickly. When deals broke down in procurement, the offering itself could be changed. When reps struggled to articulate value, we could fix both the structure of the price and the story attached to it.

Communication improved because the product was more coherent. Sales confidence improved because pricing was grounded in participation, experimentation, and evidence. Enablement became easier because there was less translation required and far more real-world context. Revenue quality improved because pricing reflected real customer value and credible expansion paths.

None of that happened because enablement got better at enablement.

It happened because commercialization became a product responsibility, and someone was accountable for the outcome.

Ownership Creates Acceleration and Clarity

This ownership model does not eliminate functions. It eliminates fragmentation by giving the company a single commercial truth: one version of what the product is, why it matters, and how value is realized over time.

Effective companies have that, even if they don’t call it that. Ineffective ones rely on translation layers and interpretive labor to survive.

When product owns commercialization, other functions can do their best work. Enablement shifts to execution coaching and skill development. PMM focuses on amplification, not invention. Finance partners on economics grounded in real usage and expansion. Sales ops optimizes motion, not meaning.

Product understanding and commercialization become first-class product responsibilities, where they belong.