Product Led Growth: Scaling From One Off Delivery to Repeatable Value
- Chris Burgess
- Mar 11, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 30, 2025
The scalable patterns that startups in emerging technology can use to turn custom delivery into product-led growth.
The textbook definition of a successful product is one that makes the most people happy with the least amount of bespoke customisation. Yet, despite their best intentions, startups building in emerging technology often begin by saying yes to everything. Every custom integration or client request feels like progress because it proves the platform works and keeps cash flowing.
Over time, this approach becomes a trap. You end up with throwaway code, fragmented solutions, and a growing collection of custom projects instead of a cohesive product.
The real leap in maturity happens when you stop treating every implementation as unique and start understanding why people are asking for what they ask. That means deeply understanding your audiences and recognising the patterns those individual projects reveal. Once you make that shift, you can start designing once and scaling to everyone, resulting in product led growth.
Here are five ways to make that transition — practical steps that change how you operate without overhauling everything you do today.
1. Start by understanding who you’re building for
When you are scaling an emerging technology, you will need to differentiate between your audiences, because each as different needs, whether thats decision makers, developers, or end users.
Decision makers need clarity on business impact. Developers need clear, actionable technical guidance they can use. End users need simple, intuitive experiences that make the technology feel valuable and effortless.
For decision makers, the gap is context. They often lack the technical background to guide implementation effectively, which leads to vague project scopes and unclear requirements. Developers are left guessing at intent, and when outcomes do not match expectations, confidence in the solution erodes.
Developers have the technical depth but not always the clarity on why features matter. Documentation explains how to use the tools but rarely how they create value. For end users, the challenge is determining the long term value - the first time experience can be great, but is it something they would use long term.
When you’re building your product, you need to make sure each audience is considered. The first step in doing that is to understand not just what each group wants, but why they want it.
2. Find out their why, by determining how they measure success
When you’re selling an emerging technology, customers rarely know exactly what they need because what attracts them, more often than not, is simply the newness of the technology itself. However, if you don’t find out how they will measure success, you will fail because that is their “why.” They will assess your product based on how much it improves what they already do today.
Your job is to uncover what they do now and how they measure it. Understand what your solution will replace in their workflow. The customer may not know, so you must be ready to explain what it replaces and describe what success looks like in their context.
Look for evidence of how they measure progress. Notice which problems they raise most often, what would make them look good internally, and which outcomes they emphasise when they describe success. These clues reveal the metrics that matter.
Once you understand their definition of success, your role shifts from asking to guiding. Prescribe solutions that connect your technology to their goals. Show not only what the product does, but why it matters in their world.
In practice, this means
Ask open questions about success today. For example, “What would good look like in six months if you keep doing what you’re doing — and if you changed?”
Ask how they measure ROI with current solutions. They might not give you specifics, but understanding how they measure is key to knowing what progress means to them.
Prescribe with purpose. Tie your technology story to the outcomes they care about, and show how those outcomes can be measured.
When you work this way, discovery becomes a two-way exchange. You listen to what customers say, learn from what they do, and design products that reflect both. This changes the conversation, and helps you to start recognising the patterns that truly matter.
If you want to go deeper on how to define and measure outcomes that truly matter to customers, I explore that in Ship Real Value, which shows how teams can shift from shipping features to shipping impact.
3. Spot the patterns that keep repeating
Once you understand your audiences and their motivations, the next step is to find the patterns that connect them.
Every custom delivery teaches you something. Usage data, support conversations, and feedback sessions all contain hints about what people are really trying to achieve. Your job is to spot what keeps coming up.
Go through everything you’ve built and start tagging recurring themes. You don’t need to dive into the backend code — instead, review the experiences, project briefs, and user journeys. What’s common across them? If you keep solving the same underlying problem or building similar experiences, tag it. Over time, you’ll begin to see those themes repeat across projects and audiences.
The real skill is recognising when repetition becomes a pattern — when something stops being coincidence and starts pointing to a shared need. Once you have those themes mapped, you can begin testing which of them are truly worth building for.
I unpack this transition further in From Custom Work to Product Value, where I share how teams escape the service mindset and start building systems that scale themselves.
4. Validate the patterns you’ve identified
Spotting patterns is the first step. The harder part is proving which ones are real. Not every repeated request signals a shared need — some are coincidence, others are context-specific. To tell the difference, you need to validate your themes using both quantitative and qualitative evidence.
Start by revisiting the themes you’ve tagged. Each one represents a hypothesis: this appears to matter to multiple customers. Your goal is to test that hypothesis with real data and real feedback.
Quantitative validation looks at what people actually do. Analyse usage, engagement, and retention to see whether behaviour supports the pattern you think you’ve found. Do customers use the feature in the same way? Does it reduce support queries or speed up delivery? These signals show whether the pattern has commercial weight.
Qualitative validation reveals why it matters. Talk to customers, partners, and internal teams to understand whether the theme aligns with how people think about value. Ask non-leading questions, listen for their language, and look for the same motivations appearing across different contexts.
When both the numbers and the narratives point in the same direction, you’ve found a pattern worth building around. That’s the time to standardise — turning your proven theme into a feature or capability that can be reused, licensed, or scaled across accounts.
Validation turns assumptions into confidence. It shows which ideas deserve investment and which should stay as one-offs. It gives every team a shared sense of what “value” really means — grounded in evidence, not opinion.
Once you have that clarity, the next step is to communicate it consistently.
For more on how to test early signals and turn them into scalable growth, see Turning Tech Innovation into Product-Market Fit, which covers how validation loops help teams move from technical experiments to real traction.
5. Tell your story: what, why and for who
Once you understand your audiences, know which patterns matter, and can measure their impact, you have everything you need to tell a good story.
Storytelling is how you translate all of this into something that resonates with customers, investors, and your own teams. A clear story connects strategy to communication and gives everyone a shared language for value.
A strong product story always covers three things:
1. What you’ve built
Describe the product simply and specifically. Focus on what it enables, not just what it does. Show how it solves the real problems surfaced in your discovery and measurement work.
2. Why it matters
Lead with purpose. Tie every capability to how your target customers measure success: faster workflows, better insights, less friction. The “why” reminds both your team and your market what progress looks like.
3. Who it’s for
Make sure every audience can see themselves in the story. Decision makers want to understand impact. Developers want practical examples. End users want to feel how it fits into their daily work. A story that reflects all three becomes the bridge between product and adoption.
When your story aligns across teams, everything sharpens. Sales conversations shift from specs to outcomes. Product teams prioritise what truly matters. Marketing amplifies a message that feels authentic because it was built from real evidence and shared understanding.
That alignment is what turns understanding into growth. Once everyone can tell the same story — what, why, and for who — your product becomes easier to explain, easier to sell, and easier to scale.
This idea of aligning every message around a shared product story is something I dive into in Use a Story to Build a Product, where I show how narrative clarity drives both alignment and adoption.
How to scale from custom work to repeatable value
Scaling a product in emerging technology depends on discipline. The startups that succeed are the ones that turn every custom delivery into a learning loop, and build that learning back into the product.
If you want to make that shift, these five principles will help you move from custom work to repeatable value:
Start by understanding who you’re building for. Learn what decision makers, developers, and end users each need, and craft a story that shows how a single product can serve them differently.
Find out what success looks like. Determine how your customers measure success, whether through what they do today or what they hope your product will improve.
Spot the patterns that keep repeating. Examine your projects and data to identify the recurring requests, interactions and behaviours that can be turned into scalable features.
Validate the patterns you’ve identified. Use data and conversation to confirm which patterns drive real impact. Ask open questions, observe how people use the product, and look for consistent outcomes that prove value.
Tell your story: what, why and for who. Align your teams around a single story that makes your product easy to understand, adopt, and scale for as many potential customers as possible.
When you work this way, every release strengthens the foundation for the next. That is how you move from custom delivery to product led growth.
If you are leading a startup or scaling a product team and want to make this transition — from custom delivery to repeatable value — let’s talk. I help founders and product leaders build systems that turn delivery into growth. Reach out at info@crwburgess.com.
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