Product Council
“A governance forum for making investment decisions visible and accountable.”
Strategic decisions happen in corridors. The monthly meeting ratifies what's already settled. Teams don't know where investment choices get made.
A Product Council is a governance forum for making product investment decisions visible and accountable. You bring together appropriate leadership representation, define clear decision rights, and create a regular cadence for strategic portfolio choices — without micromanaging individual product decisions.
A well-run council bridges executive strategy and product team execution, ensuring alignment whilst preserving team autonomy. It earns its keep in multi-product organisations where coordination across products is critical and investment trade-offs need a single forum.
Common dysfunctions include councils that meet too infrequently to be useful, attempt to make too many decisions, or lack the authority to resolve conflicts. It fails when it becomes a bottleneck — an approval queue that slows everything down and decides remarkably little — or when decision rights aren't clear enough to prevent the real conversations from moving elsewhere.
Your next move: Does your Product Council actually decide things, or has it become a place where decisions go to be ratified after the real conversation happened elsewhere?
What it looked like for them
Quibi, April–December 2020. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.75 billion for Quibi — short-form premium video designed for mobile commuters. Ten-minute episodes, Hollywood production values, designed for the gap between train stops.
It launched three weeks into a global pandemic, when nobody was commuting. The post-mortem blamed COVID. The real problem was the product decisions a council should have caught: no ability to take screenshots, no casting to a television, no social sharing.
Every feature that would have let users spread the content had been stripped out to protect the IP. The product had been optimised to protect itself from its users. A product council — a cross-functional group stress-testing decisions against real user behaviour — would have surfaced the tension between content protection and content distribution before launch.
Katzenberg and Whitman had experience, funding, and talent. What they didn't have was a structure for asking "what will users actually do with this?" before committing $1.75 billion to the answer.
“The room has gone quiet and I don't know what to ask next.”