Most essays like this begin by pointing out that a company that over-focuses on X is headed for trouble, for almost any value of X. They then present Y, which if properly pursued, will solve the problem of X. Both sides of this argument are subject to “No True Scotsman” problems. By definition, over-focusing on X is going to be problematic, that’s tautological. But what about companies that are giving X the right amount of focus?

Likewise, of course if you’re doing X badly and then you change to doing Y “right,” things will get better. But how much of that is X vs Y, and how much is magically going from doing something wrong to doing something right?

The essay pitches some education on how to do “market-focused” right. Fair enough, let’s grant that in the hands of the well-intentioned, doing market-focused right will lead to success. Ok, but will taking a similar approach to fixing sales-focused also help? Is the assumption that sales-focused cannot be done right under any circumstances? I’m not sure the essay establishes this.

Same for product-led growth (“PLG”), the current hotness in product management thanks in large part to Amazon’s success. Ok, if PLG done wrong is bad, can we fix PLG and do it right?

So my first observation is that the argument “Doing X badly is worse than doing Y correctly, so do Y correctly” neglects scenarios where we fix X. Is that an option as well?

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My second observation is the dual of the above. What makes us think we can do Y correctly?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting the author’s educational offering is suspect. Come to your own conclusion about this, just like evaluating any vendor of a silver bullet.

I’m suggesting something else: For those companies doing sales-led or product-led badly, what if the problem is the company and its leadership, not the methodology?

In that case, you have to fix the company and its leadership, or they’ll bring their problems with them to “market-led growth.”

I think of this second scenario often.

Consider the time when companies were transitioning from shipping software on media to SaaS. Continuous integration and other practices transformed the very notion of “shipping,” and solved many problems companies had with death marches to press golden masters.

Shipping software on media was X, SaaS was Y. Many companies benefited greatly from the shift. But they were usually companies that were already doing reasonably well with shipping software on media.

If a company was good at shipping software on media, switching to SaaS was a shock, but it removed the limitations imposed by physical media and distribution.

But if a company had trouble shipping quality software to plan with physical media, it didn’t magically become good at shipping quality software incrementally with SaaS. SaaS did not fix problems with engineering culture or leadership.

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p.s. None of the above applies for much of HN’s demographic: If you’re starting from scratch, you don’t have a “Doing X badly” problem to begin with. You can sit down and evaluate sales-led versus product-led versus market-focus purely on their individual merits. This is one of the great advantages of starting from scratch.

But even if you don’t have a “Doing X badly” problem, be careful with arguments that contrast “Doing X badly” with “Doing Y right.” A balanced approach to choosing X versus Y would be to compare doing X right with doing Y right, and also to think about whether X or Y is going to be easier to do right for you in your situation.