Ecosystem Thinking for Product Managers: When Everyone Hits Their Targets and the Company Still Loses

Customer focus 2.0, the paper cuts nobody owns, and how to read a board you're not being measured on.

Jul 28, 2026

The sales team is having its best quarter in two years.

The numbers are up on every screen. Commissions are flowing. The leaderboard is a party. From where they’re standing, everyone is doing exactly what they’re paid to do, and doing it well.

And that’s the problem. Because they’re paid to sell the wrong thing.

There are two products they could put in front of a customer. One carries a higher margin and pulls the customer deeper into everything else the company offers, the natural first step into a longer relationship. The other is lower margin, goes nowhere, and happens to pay a bigger commission. Guess which one the leaderboard rewards.

So the team sells it. Again and again. Every sale a small win on their board and a small loss on the company’s. Margin left on the table, and a customer landed who will never expand.

None of it shows up as a disaster. No fire, no outage, no bad quarter to point at. Just a thousand small, sensible-looking decisions, each one costing a little. Paper cuts. No single one matters. Together they bleed you out.

I have watched versions of this play out more times than I can count, in organisations that were genuinely good at what they did. And the maddening part was never that people didn’t care, or weren’t capable. These were companies that talked about customer lifetime value constantly. They packaged products together, priced the bundle, put the connected customer relationship in every board deck.

The strategy was written for the whole. The targets were written for the parts. And when those two disagree, the targets win.

That is the entire problem in one sentence, and nobody in the story is the villain. Which is exactly what makes it so hard to fix, and so worth talking about.

This is what I’ve been thinking about since Joca Torres joined us on Product Circle Chat.

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👋I’m Irene Liakos. A product management and growth expert with over 2 decades of experience growing product profitably across Telco, Banking, Fintech, AI, Data, Travel, Ecommerce and more. I teach, coach and advise product managers and business leaders. Reach out to me if your products aren’t delivering the value you need for your business to grow. You can contact me at irene@phronesisadvisory.com

So what is ecosystem thinking, actually?

Most writing on this hands you a stakeholder map and tells you to think in systems. That isn’t wrong, but it’s the diagram, not the idea. You end up with a nice artefact and no change in how you decide anything on Monday morning.

The definition I keep returning to comes from Joca Torres, who joined us at Product Circle Chat recently to talk about the four principles of a successful product culture. He describes an ecosystem mindset as making decisions that generate value for all the actors in your ecosystem, and he frames it as customer focus turbocharged. Customer focus 2.0.

That reframe is the whole thing.

We already believe in customer focus. Every company says it, and most genuinely mean it. The failure isn’t that we don’t care about the customer. It’s that we have quietly decided there is only one customer worth caring about, usually the one who pays, and everyone else in the picture becomes a necessary evil to be managed, negotiated with, or worked around.

Practising a real ecosystem mindset means four things:

Accepting that you serve more than one type of customer. Almost every company does, whether or not it has ever said so out loud.
Giving genuine attention and energy to all of them. Not just the one on the invoice.
Understanding and actively influencing the relationships between them. The connections are part of your product, even when you didn’t build them.
Refusing to make decisions that help one participant by harming another. Including the reverse case, where the business wins and the customer loses.

That fourth one is the sharpest, because it kills a trade-off most of us make without noticing. Every “we’ll take the margin hit on this one” and every “the partner will just have to wear it” is a decision to let one part of the ecosystem pay for another’s win. Sometimes that’s genuinely necessary. Far more often, it’s just easier than thinking harder.

The objection: “we’re not a marketplace”

This is where most people file the idea away. Ecosystem thinking sounds like something for the platforms and marketplaces with obvious sides. If you have one product and a fairly homogeneous customer base, it can feel like a principle written for someone else.

It isn’t, for a reason that’s easy to miss.

Your customer never exists in isolation. She has a manager who approves the spend, a team who has to adopt the thing, an IT function who has to secure it, a procurement process, a finance person who sees the renewal, and a job she’s trying to get done that involves five tools that aren’t yours. Your product lives inside all of that. You already have an ecosystem. You have just been calling most of it “stakeholders” and treating it as friction rather than as the terrain you’re playing on.

And then there is the ring closer to home: the linked ecosystem of your own products. The suite, the portfolio, the connected set of things a single customer touches. Four products, four teams, four roadmaps, one household. The customer experiences it as one relationship. The company runs it as four scoreboards.

What it looks like when someone actually does it

Here’s a scenario I’ve seen the shape of many times.

A company sells rostering software to hospitality venues. The paying customer is the venue owner. That’s who signs, who renews, and who the product team’s targets are built around.

But look at the actual board. There’s the owner. There’s the venue manager who builds the rosters every week. There are the casual staff who receive shifts, swap them, and get paid off them. There’s the payroll system it feeds. Four participants, one paying.

The product manager is measured on owner retention. So the roadmap fills with owner-facing things. Labour cost dashboards. Compliance reporting. Multi-site views. All genuinely valuable, all defensible, all pointed at the person on the invoice.

Meanwhile the casual staff experience quietly rots. Shift swaps take four taps and often fail. Notifications are noisy enough that people turn them off. So staff stop using the app, and shift changes migrate to group chats and text messages.

Now watch the ecosystem do its work. Because changes happen outside the system, the roster data goes stale. The labour cost dashboard the owner loves starts producing numbers that don’t match the actual wage bill. The payroll integration throws errors. The venue manager loses faith and goes back to a spreadsheet.

Eighteen months later the owner churns, and the exit interview says the reporting was unreliable.

Nobody built a bad product here. The team built exactly the product their targets asked for. What they couldn’t see, because nothing in their world was pointed at it, was that the participant who pays nothing was the supply side of the data everything else depended on. Serving the staff wasn’t a nice thing to do for people who weren’t customers. It was the only way to protect the customer who was.

That’s what reading the board gets you. Not a warmer feeling about stakeholders. A view of where the value actually leaks.

It isn’t only incentives. It’s motivations.

I’ve led with commission structures and targets because they’re the most visible version of this, and the easiest to point at in a room. But they’re the shallow end.

What’s underneath is harder to see. Capable people keep making decisions that are sensible locally and expensive collectively, and it’s usually because they’re responding to motivations that don’t appear on any dashboard.

Performance reviews. This is the big one, and it’s rarely discussed honestly. Someone’s rating, their promotion, their sense of whether the year went well, is set against goals scoped to their own product. Review objectives are written product by product, team by team. Helping the team next door succeed almost never appears in one. So people work to what’s written down, because that’s what they’ll be judged on. That isn’t cynicism. It’s a reasonable response to the rules they’ve been given.

The need for visible ownership. Career progression in product runs on being able to point at something and say that was mine. Contributing to a win that belongs to someone else, or to the system generally, is much harder to show. So people gravitate towards work they’ll get credit for, even when the more valuable work sits in the gaps between teams.

Identity and territory. People become “the person who owns onboarding” or “the payments person,” and that identity is worth defending. Handing scope to another team can feel like being diminished, regardless of whether it’s the right call. This is one of the most under-acknowledged forces in any organisation.

Budget and headcount cycles. Scope means headcount, headcount means survival. Protecting your patch isn’t greed, it’s a reasonable response to an annual process that punishes teams who look smaller than last year.

Risk and blame. The ecosystem-serving move is harder to defend if it doesn’t work. “I did what my objectives said” is a complete answer. “I gave ground to another team because I thought it was better for the whole” requires you to have been right, and for someone senior to remember that you were. Most people take the safer option, and it’s hard to blame them.

Genuine scarcity of attention. Sometimes there is no dark motive at all. Nobody has time to understand what’s happening three teams away, so they don’t. The board isn’t unread because people are lazy. It’s unread because nothing in the working week is designed to make anyone read it.

Information asymmetry. In a lot of organisations, no one person can actually see the whole picture. The data lives in different systems, the targets aren’t published, and the connections between products exist in the customer’s experience but nowhere in the org chart.

So when I say read the board, I don’t only mean map the actors. I mean read what each of them is rewarded for, measured on, judged against, and quietly afraid of. Those four things predict behaviour far better than any stated strategy does.

It also changes what you do about it. If the problem is a commission plan, you fix the commission plan. But if the problem is that a capable Product Manager three teams over has a review objective pointing the opposite way to yours, no alignment workshop is going to move them, and they aren’t being difficult. They’re doing their job. The fix sits with whoever writes the objectives, which means the useful thing you can do is make the collision visible to that person.

Read the board, then play the long game

Ecosystem thinking is two skills wearing one name, and they come in order.

Reading the board is the perception work. Chess was never about playing your own pieces well. It’s about seeing the whole position, every player, what each one wants, and where the game is going. Understanding the context, seeing every actor, and reading their motivations honestly rather than as obstacles.

Product management trains the opposite instinct. Zoom in. One problem, one user, one metric this quarter. It’s a good instinct, and it’s exactly why this is so hard to build. Nothing on your scorecard rewards the zoom-out, so almost nobody develops it.

Playing the long game is what you do once you can see. Steering toward the product that pulls through the ecosystem rather than the one that pads the quarter. Giving ground to a partner because the system you both depend on gets stronger. Naming the target that’s quietly steering everyone wrong, even though saying so makes this quarter look worse.

This isn’t generosity, and it isn’t collaboration theatre. It’s choosing the most profitable and strategically aligned outcome for the linked whole over the local win on your own board. A rising system carries your product further than winning your own corner ever will.

What it’s worth

You stop paying the ecosystem tax. The paper cuts. Margin quietly given away, customers landed who never expand, duplicated build, internal competition for the same attention. It never appears as a line item, which is why it never gets fixed.

Your decisions get more durable. A decision that helps one participant at another’s expense creates a debt that comes due later, usually as churn, partner attrition, or a workaround that becomes permanent. Decisions that hold across the ecosystem tend to stay solved.

You see the constraint that’s actually binding. Most products that stall aren’t stalling on their own roadmap. They’re stalling on something three teams or one partner away, and you can’t fix what you can’t see.

And people start trusting you with more. Reading the whole board is what people mean when they say someone thinks commercially, or thinks strategically. It’s usually what stands between a Product Manager and decisions bigger than their own product.

Because that’s the line it draws. Everyone can learn to play their own pieces well. Almost nobody makes the jump to reading the whole board and playing for the linked whole rather than the local score. It’s the last skill you build, no framework teaches it, and it can’t be reduced to a template. It only comes from looking up.

Product Managers play their pieces. Product leaders read the board.

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Frequently asked questions

What is ecosystem thinking in product management?

Ecosystem thinking is understanding the context, reading every actor and their motivations, and navigating all of it so that your product succeeds and the linked ecosystem your product belongs to succeeds with it. It means recognising that you serve more than one type of customer, giving genuine attention to all of them rather than only the one who pays, understanding the relationships between them, and refusing to make decisions that help one participant by harming another.

What is the difference between ecosystem thinking and systems thinking?

Systems thinking is the broader discipline of understanding how parts of a system interact and produce outcomes. Ecosystem thinking applies that lens specifically to the participants around a product: customers, users, partners, internal teams, and the connected products a single customer touches. The practical difference is that ecosystem thinking is a decision rule rather than a diagram. It changes what you choose to build and what you refuse to trade away, not just how you map the environment.

Does ecosystem thinking only apply to marketplaces and platforms?

No. It’s most obvious in multi-sided platforms, but it applies to any company. Customers never exist in isolation. There is a manager who approves the spend, a team who has to adopt the product, an IT function who has to secure it, and other tools involved in the job the customer is trying to get done. Most single-product companies already have an ecosystem. They have simply been calling it “stakeholders” and treating it as friction.

Why do organisations fail at ecosystem thinking even when the strategy calls for it?

Because the strategy is written for the whole and the targets are written for the parts. Commission structures, individual performance review objectives, budget and headcount cycles, the need for visible ownership, and simple scarcity of attention all point people towards optimising their own product. When stated strategy and individual motivations disagree, motivations win. The people involved are not being difficult; they are responding sensibly to the rules they have been given.

How do Product Managers develop an ecosystem mindset?

Start by identifying every participant your product touches, including those who pay nothing. Then work out what each of them is rewarded for, measured on, judged against, and quietly worried about. Look for places where a decision that helps one participant creates a cost for another, especially where the cost surfaces later or in a different team. The skill is built through deliberately looking beyond your own roadmap and targets, because nothing in a typical scorecard rewards it.

What is the cost of ignoring the ecosystem?

The costs are rarely visible as a single line item. They show up as margin quietly given away, customers acquired who never expand, duplicated build across teams, internal competition for the same customer attention, and churn that gets attributed to the wrong cause. Individually each one looks small. Collectively they are significant, and because no one owns them, they are rarely fixed.

Where in your organisation are the targets pointed away from the strategy?

Joca Torres joined us at 💡Product Circle⭕ Chat to talk through the four principles of a successful product culture. The Ecosystem Mindset was one of the four principles. Product Circle Chat runs fortnightly with product and tech thought leaders. Subscribe to The Product Venn to be in the room for the next one.

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