In the spotlight
I've spent most of my career on the periphery. Building the tools, documentation and platforms that make it possible to build the product that customers pay for. I remember fighting tooth and nail for headcount. Lobbying to get some time on the company all-hands to make sure people know that we exist. Being worried that when cuts inevitably come, the teams I work with would be first on the chopping block.
Now, I'm in the spotlight. I'm the product leader for the product that makes the majority of our revenue. I fought so long to be in the spotlight, and now that I'm here I'm struggling to bear it's weight.
The weight of the spotlight
Working on a revenue-generating product is often treated as a privilege. The work is visible. Impact is easier to point to. Success maps cleanly to business outcomes.
But that visibility comes with scrutiny.
Every decision is observed, evaluated, and challenged - by leadership, sales, marketing, finance, customer success, and often customers themselves. The closer your work is to revenue, the more people feel entitled to an opinion about it.
I thought I'd spend my time adding new capabilities to the product, but I've learned that in the spotlight you don't ship features. You defend them.
Revenue = Restrictions
The closer your work is to the revenue, the less freedom you have on your own destiny. With so many people's careers relying on your product (internally, and within your customers) you're subject to a large list of constraints:
- Features promised to sign a deal
- Existing customer expectations
- Revenue targets from the business
As you try to deliver all of these, you also need to maintain stability for your existing customers. You can't break anything, ever. Experimentation becomes expensive. Reversibility matters more than elegance.
You're walking down a narrow corridor under a bright light, stepping carefully do you don't touch the wall on either side. As you walk, people are shouting their opinions on pricing, roadmap priorities and market positioning.
And you can't ignore those opinions. Each statement is framed as risk. If we don't ship feature X, customer Y will churn. If we charge $10,000, we'll lose the deal. We need to shift messaging to CIOs to capture that budget.
System breakdown
Over time, everything grinds to a halt.
- People ship the safe thing, not the impactful thing
- Timelines are extended so that we can "underpromise and overdeliver"
- People optimize for defensibility rather than learning
This isn't your team doing the wrong things. They're reacting to the risk in the system with a rational response. No-one wants to be associated with a loss of revenue due to a bet they made. So we keep doing the safe things.
The trade-off
When I think back to my time on auxiliary teams, there was no spotlight. We'd occasionally get feedback from a customer, but overall our destiny was our own. We could make the big bets, but when they were successful no-one really understood just how impactful the work was.
For auxiliary teams, success looks like nothing breaking, and no-one complaining. They keep the lights on all while longing for the spotlight themselves, not realising that there's a cost to pay.
Revenue teams trade autonomy for visibility.
Auxiliary teams trade visibility for autonomy.
Neither is easier. They just fail in different directions.
Learning to carry the light
I don't think the answer is to work in the shadows. Revenue work is what pays the bills, and the scrutiny exists for real reasons. It's rational for people to protect it.
But the cost of that protection is often invisible: slower learning, narrower ambition, and teams that mistake defensibility for good judgment. When everything is framed as existential risk, we stop asking what’s worth building and start asking what’s hardest to argue against.
The work, I’m learning, isn’t just product strategy. It’s systems design. Creating space where teams can make bets without being crushed by hindsight. Separating real risk from imagined risk. Absorbing pressure so it doesn’t flatten everyone else.
That's the role of a leader. To make space. To bring clarity. To be the filter that brings signal to the noise.
The spotlight isn’t going away. But maybe it doesn’t have to blind us.