My new role is Product Owner

The necessary friction of P&L

The mandate is clear: step into the Product Owner role while retaining the UX Lead responsibilities. It is a necessary friction, a dual-hat that forces a more efficient, strategically constrained approach to our product development. In the Enterprise and Live Broadcast sector, we simply cannot afford the luxury of design for design’s sake. Every pixel, every interaction, must be a lever for business value.

For years, I have championed the user. Now, I am equally accountable to the P&L. This is not a conflict of interest; it is a convergence. The most successful products in our space are those that are both intensely usable and commercially viable. My job has evolved from asking, “How do we make this intuitive for the user?” to the more challenging, strategic question: “How does this intuitive design decision drive operational efficiency, user retention, or increased contract value?”

This new role is less about adding responsibilities and more about removing the translation layer between design and commercial judgement. It centralises the ‘why’ of the business with the ‘how’ of the user experience.

Mastering the language of commercial value

The biggest change is the lexicon. As a UX Lead, my vocabulary centred on concepts like affordance, cognitive load, and information architecture. I now spend a substantial portion of my week speaking the language of the Enterprise: Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Lifetime Value (LTV), operational expenditure, and churn.

This transition is demanding, but it is precisely what is required for design to earn its seat at the most strategic table. We must learn to articulate the ROI of usability. For example: a simplified, four-step onboarding flow is not merely ‘better design’; in our context, it is a quantifiable reduction in support tickets, translating directly into a saving on operational expenditure and a faster time-to-value for a client. This is the language that resonates with the business; this is the language of value.

I am finding that this focus creates a necessary constraint. It is a principle I have applied to personal productivity before; a focused, limited palette can force a deeper level of creativity. In product, a strategic constraint from a clear P&L target does the same: it eliminates frivolous features and forces us to be surgical in our design and development choices. If a design solution does not demonstrably move a commercial metric, it is waste.

Efficiency and scale in live broadcast

Our environment, Live Broadcast, is high-stakes; a minute of downtime or an inefficient workflow can cost substantial revenue and impact reputation. In this setting, the dual-role is an inherent advantage.

Historically, there could be a disconnect: the UX Lead fighting for design purity, and the Product Owner fighting for business targets. This dual role eliminates that inefficiency, putting the final strategic judgement in one pair of hands. I can now make immediate, integrated decisions: sacrificing a minor visual flourish if it demonstrably improves system latency, or spending an extra sprint on a design system component that we know will drastically reduce future development cost across multiple products.

This synthesis of design rigour and commercial judgement is, in my judgement, the future of Enterprise product leadership. It is the evolution from being a steward of the user to being a strategic leader accountable for the entire product lifecycle, from initial sketch to bottom-line performance.

A new kind of rigour

This shift is exciting because it is where our UX expertise can finally be measured by the metrics that matter most to the business. It is a challenging new level of strategic rigour: using the discipline of design to drive commercial results. For our products, our team, and our users, this is not just a role change; it is a critical step towards scaled, profitable product excellence.