In this conversation, Sightglass co-founder John Jarosz sits down with Craig Unsworth, a seasoned portfolio CPO who works across middle and upper mid-market PE. Craig has witnessed this shift firsthand, seeing funds in sectors traditionally dominated by sales or operations-led growth embrace product-led strategies not as nice-to-haves, but as existential necessities. With competitive moats eroded and companies running out of genuinely new things to sell, the ability to execute product initiatives at pace has become critical for differentiation.

The conversation around product as a value creation lever has evolved rapidly, but success requires more than product purists — it demands commercially minded leaders who can anchor product initiatives to the same financial metrics that PE partners understand and trust.

John: PE firms are leaning harder into product as a lever for margin valuation and exit narrative, especially in sectors traditionally focused on sales or ops-led growth. In your experience as a portfolio CPO, what do you think is driving this fundamental change in how PE is thinking about value creation?

Craig: For decades, funds have operated according to a playbook built on financial engineering and leverage. For a sector run by accountants, that felt comfortable. But a few years ago, the math stopped mathing. The focus on just chasing net revenue retention or headline metrics started showing cracks — as we saw with SaaS in 2022 and 2023.

What funds are looking at now is product as a lever because moats have been eroded, especially with the rapidity of change with AI in the past 12 months. Competitive advantages have narrowed, and the ability to execute at pace and create momentum from the product itself is one of the few drivers that can be controlled from within the asset.

It’s a bit like fast fashion in retail. The ability to go from concept to store in six weeks is the existential piece for someone like H&M or Zara. I think “Product” is having a similar moment. Someone will see something on stage at a major technology business and expect it to be implemented in their company, driving transformation and building those hyper-automation pathways within months or years.

John:  I really like your fast-fashion analogy. The “Holy Grail” of lean is so much easier to achieve because testing and learning can occur at a rapid pace. So the more experienced and proven product leaders you have, the more you can leverage their expertise to iterate even more quickly and get back into market.

Craig: Also, companies have run out of things to sell. They haven’t had new products in quite a while because there hasn’t been a major technological revolution for quite some time.

John:  I’d say it’s the first thing since the mobile app platform ecosystem was created by Apple and then replicated. Many of the comments and problems I hear remind me of that time, when people were concerned about immediate and aggressive disruption and the need to move into a new digital domain quickly while maintaining relevance. So I wonder if the real challenge is stickiness. Now that someone can come for your lunch pretty darn quickly, how do you stay sticky? As you mentioned earlier, there aren’t many moats left, and constantly adding features will only create bloat. With custom software being more accessible and affordable than ever before,  I’m betting that design practicality and the curation of features will reemerge — at least in part — as the answer.

You’ve worked on a lot of these transactions. How has the conversation around using product as a value lever evolved from your perspective? Do you feel like your PE partners are “getting” product, or is it still more in its educational phase?

Craig: Both. I think the good funds — and I mostly work in middle mid-market and upper mid-market — know what good looks like. They don’t know how to replicate it because they’re not practitioners themselves, but they know how to brief it. They know that they want someone to come in and do X, Y, Z in order to achieve A, B, C. And it took them a while to realize that the chief product officer was the role to fill that need, but I think they mostly get it now.

They understand the product as a lever; they understand that the product provides the sales funnel with more items to sell and the operations funnel with more ways to be more efficient. And I think they understand that there’s a difference between products and technology or products and engineering.

John: When you encounter a company that’s been traditionally sales-led, what signals indicate there’s product-led creation potential, and what are the common blind spots?

Craig: Quite often, I get brought in around a question of “we see churn is a little higher than we would’ve expected and we don’t know why,” or “we haven’t had as much upsell recently,” or “we’ve noticed a few new competitors in the space that didn’t exist this time last year.” It’s those kinds of triggers — threats that get turned into opportunities.

There’s a very interesting link to the leadership piece as well, because in half of the engagements I work on, a product leader has been in place, but it’s been the wrong person. So there’s been this kind of leadership limiting factor where maybe a homegrown product person or worse, a co-founder who thought they could do product on the side as well, has been in place and they’ve been running it for X number of years, and suddenly the board or the management team or the investor have realized this is not going to cut it.

John:  This is something we talk about a lot at Sightglass, but we’re seeing it in a slightly different way. Typically, the person who has secured funding is a market expert but lacks experience in starting a tech company.

How do you quantify product impact for PE partners when they’re used to seeing ops and sales metrics?

Craig: I think a lot of product purists — which I’m not, I’m a very commercial product leader — have tried to create their own metrics. They’ve tried to pull something obscure out of Pendo and think “this is how we’re going to measure it and this is why the board will be interested,” and it doesn’t work. I think you have to anchor it back to the same metrics. So, I always plot out the pathway for this new product or feature to stem churn. How can we prove this and tangibly build an upsell pathway?

I use the same metrics as the fund. Whether you’re working towards something like the rule of 40, which is a really common metric for private equity, it’s effectively adding up multiple metrics. You’ll have growth, net revenue retention, and EBITDA, for example. Add these three together, and if they hit 40, you’ve got a healthy, sustainable business. So, if that’s what the investors, the board, and the management team have focused on, that’s what the product needs to deliver against as well.

John: I think it’s also important to acknowledge that this is not the domain of a product purist. I think many product leaders who have come from a very disciplined UX or design background, for example, are not very good at this. The product people who do well here are those who have come from a more strategic background, such as strategists and planners, because they’ve always been comfortable with metrics as well.

Do you have a typical timeframe for seeing meaningful returns?

Craig: Generally, it’s six to 12 months. And there are three points of entry. First, I’m brought in just before a deal, during due diligence, or just at the point of a deal — the first 100 days. Having something meaningful to move the needle in that six- to 12-month period is really important.

The second area where I’m brought in is at the end of year one, where everyone realizes we are a third or a quarter of the way through our hold period, and we haven’t moved the needle yet. The third time frame is approximately a year out from the point at which they plan to return to the market and sell the company again. So in all of those situations, there’s a focus point of no more than about 12 months.

John:  That’s so interesting. My take is that every product leader has their strengths; no one is a unicorn. I agree in principle, but would like to see the product organization reflect a well-balanced team rather than just an emphasis on the leader. 

I do think it’s harder for purists (using your language) to be as effective here, but for me, it all goes back to the leader knowing their strengths and hiring for their weaknesses.

That’s the tension we’re going to continue seeing play out—this need for speed and commercial impact balanced against building something sustainable. It’s why the talent piece matters so much. You need teams that can execute at pace without creating technical debt that becomes the next fund’s problem. That’s the real test of whether product-led value creation sticks or becomes just another buzzword that gets abandoned when the market shifts again.