Company as a Product

“One of the things that we do differently is that we treat our company as a product” — Jason Fried, CEO and co-founder of 37signals (Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz)

“Culture is a Product. Every company builds two products — one is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team.” — Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot

Some of the most successful founders have already unlocked a secret that most organizations miss entirely: the organization itself is a product — and it deserves the same rigor, investment, and continuous improvement as anything you ship to customers.

What Does It Mean to Treat Your Company as a Product?

Treating the company as a product means applying the same disciplines that make great product teams effective — customer discovery, iterative delivery, outcome orientation, and continuous improvement — to the development of the organization itself.

Through the lens of a Product Operating Model, this breaks into three dimensions:

Mindset — Approach every organizational challenge with a view to stakeholders, users, outcomes, dependencies, ownership, and value. Ask “who are the customers of this internal process or experience?” before asking “what should we build?”

One concrete example: seeing yourself as a Steward of the employee experience. One of Yuval’s clients — a COO in everything but title — chose the title “Head of Stewardship” to make this mindset explicit and visible to the organization.

Alignment — Organize, structure, and manage to a product model. Define cross-functional teams around company-as-a-product challenges. Align them to shared outcome-oriented goals (OKRs, for example).

For instance: who needs to be involved to improve the hiring and onboarding experience? One organization carved out a small cross-functional team involving People, IT, and hiring managers (as customers of this product) to collaborate on the whole experience — working as a team aligned to a shared OKR.

Investment — Plan and invest in your company like it is one of the products in your portfolio. Define a strategy for it. Set intermediate goals. Make conscious investment choices between improving the company vs. building customer-facing products. Manage the flow of those investments.

Why Is the Company-as-a-Product Idea Important?

Most organizations invest heavily in developing products for customers and almost nothing in deliberately developing themselves as organizations. The result is that the management operating system — how decisions are made, how teams are structured, how work flows, how strategy is executed — becomes increasingly misaligned with the complexity of the work.

The company-as-a-product idea closes this gap by applying the same rigor to internal development that ambitious product organizations apply to their customer-facing products.

The practical implications are significant:

• Internal customers — employees, teams, and leaders are customers of internal products (HR processes, tooling, communication systems, reporting). Treating them as customers changes how you design and improve these systems.
• Outcomes over outputs — rather than measuring “we held 200 onboarding sessions,” you measure “new joiners reach full productivity 30% faster.” The outcome frame changes what gets prioritized.
• Continuous improvement — rather than running an annual reorganization or a once-a-decade ERP replacement, you improve the organization iteratively, with frequent inspection and adaptation.
• Explicit investment — rather than letting the organization drift, you make deliberate portfolio decisions about where to invest in organizational capability vs. customer-facing product capability.

What Does the Agile Product Operating Model Add to Company as a Product?

The agile and Product Operating Model layer makes “company as a product” actionable rather than a metaphor:

Designing self-managed, empowered teams with minimal dependencies — applying the same team topology thinking to internal teams (People, Finance, IT, Legal) as to product teams.

Working in quick iterative cycles — building increments of organizational value, testing them with internal customers, inspecting results, and adapting. The equivalent of “working software” for internal products is a meaningfully improved employee or team experience.

Aligning to outcome-oriented goals — OKRs or similar goal systems applied to organizational improvement work, with leading indicators to track whether the change is actually working.

Focusing on the right things — stop starting, start finishing. Even organizational improvement work can become a portfolio of too many simultaneous initiatives, each competing for the same leadership attention.

Leveraging proven frameworks — Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe practices that work for product development translate well to managing complex organizational change when applied with appropriate adaptation.

What Are Practical Examples of Company as a Product?

Developer Experience as a Product — a team explicitly responsible for the tooling, build systems, testing infrastructure, and developer workflows that make the engineering organization faster and less frustrated. This team has a Product Owner, a roadmap driven by developer satisfaction and productivity metrics, and a regular cadence of shipping improvements.

Employee Onboarding as a Product — instead of an onboarding “program” run by HR, a cross-functional team continuously improves the new joiner experience: measuring time-to-productivity, testing different onboarding structures, and treating new joiners as customers whose journey needs to be designed and optimized.

Hiring Process as a Product — applying product discovery to recruiting: interviewing candidates (as customers of the process), hiring managers, and successful hires about where the hiring funnel creates friction, then iterating on the process.

Internal Knowledge Systems as a Product — wikis, documentation, and knowledge management systems treated as products with users, metrics (is the information people need actually findable?), and a team accountable for their quality.

Who Should Be Thinking About Company as a Product?

The company-as-a-product mindset applies across leadership levels:

• Team leads and managers can apply it to the team experience they are creating for their reports — the psychological safety, clarity of direction, quality of feedback, and fairness of process.
• Functional leaders (People, Finance, Legal, IT) can apply it to the internal services and experiences their functions deliver to the broader organization.
• COOs and Chief of Staff leaders can apply it to the company’s operating system — how decisions are made, how information flows, how resources are allocated.
• CEOs and founders like Jason Fried and Dharmesh Shah can apply it to the organizational design and culture they are actively building, rather than passively experiencing.

At every level, the shift is the same: from managing the organization as an inherited system to actively developing it as a product.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Company as a Product concept? Company as a Product is the idea that the organization itself — its culture, processes, structures, and employee experience — should be deliberately designed and continuously improved using the same product thinking disciplines applied to customer-facing products. It means having explicit customers (employees, teams, leaders), measurable outcomes, cross-functional ownership, and iterative development of the organization.

Who coined the Company as a Product idea? The idea has been articulated by several notable founders. Jason Fried of 37signals (Basecamp) described explicitly treating the company as a product in an interview with Guy Raz. Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot framed it as “culture is a product.” The concept has parallels in team topology thinking, developer experience movements, and the Platform Engineering discipline.

How does Company as a Product relate to the Product Operating Model? The Product Operating Model defines how an organization operates to deliver products effectively — empowered teams, outcome orientation, continuous discovery and delivery. Company as a Product applies these same operating model principles to the organization itself. It is the Product Operating Model turned inward.

What is the difference between Company as a Product and Culture Work? Culture work typically focuses on values, behaviors, and norms — often through narratives, leadership modeling, and programs. Company as a Product is more operational: it defines specific internal products, assigns cross-functional teams with accountability, sets measurable outcomes, and iterates based on evidence. It does not replace culture work, but it makes organizational development far more concrete and manageable.

How do you start implementing Company as a Product? Start by identifying one internal experience that is clearly broken — onboarding, the hiring process, developer tooling, or meeting culture — and apply product thinking to it: Who are the customers? What outcomes do we want for them? What are we testing this quarter? Assign ownership, set a 90-day goal with a measurable outcome, and run a retrospective at the end. That is your first company-as-a-product sprint.

Interested in applying product thinking to organizational development? Explore the Company as a Product approach or connect with Yuval to discuss how this applies to your context.