

When Enterprise Growth Changes the Product Operating Model
Meeting Agenda
Welcome and intro to PLX (5 min)
Speaker’s talk, including Q&A (45 min)
Participant feedback survey (5 min)
Networking breakouts (15 min)
The Speaker
Colin Bowern is Chief Product Officer at Octopus Deploy, where he wakes up every day thinking about how to accelerate software delivery. His background spans music, financial, public sector, and technology industries including start-up and multi-national organizations. He is passionate about growing product people through the Product Aotearoa community in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The Talk
Enterprise growth isn't a sales strategy -- it's a go-to-market change. From the outside it looks simple: bigger customers, bigger contracts, more revenue. In reality, it's far more than that.
You wake up one day and individual named accounts are in every conversation. Opportunities become win-at-all-costs. A roadmap that satisfied one set of reps doesn't pass the bar with the next. PMs get pinged directly to drag a deal over the line. The product that served the last several thousand customers suddenly isn't good enough for the next ten — and every one of those ten needs your best people to unblock it.
This talk is about what we learned and what it cost us when we got it wrong:
How enterprise deals change product priorities and challenged product strategy
How Product, Marketing, Customer Success need to evolve alongside Sales
What changes when the buyer and the user are no longer the same person
Why adoption has to be designed into the growth model
How large deals can create new revenue patterns, expectations and organizational dependencies
The goal is not to argue for or against enterprise sales. This is a talk about what happens after the decision to “go enterprise” -- and what you need to put in place when enterprise growth becomes parts of the company strategy.