A product executive can spend years shipping things people use and still stumble over a deceptively small question: what makes a great product? SC Moatti had worked at Facebook and Nokia. Yet, recalling that question in a 2018 interview, she admitted: “And I didn’t have the answer.” Experience had supplied examples. Explaining the pattern was another job.
- Free membership, podcasts, newsletters, and product-management resources.
- Paid corporate mentorship and executive circles turn discussion into recurring work.
- Awards put products and the people building them under the same roof.
The question behind the crowd
Moatti’s account of the origin is appealingly practical. While writing the book that became Mobilized, she discovered that different heads of product had different answers. She started Products That Count in 2014 as a place to exchange them. The organization now describes itself as a global nonprofit network serving more than 500,000 professionals. Its July 2026 announcement puts the network above 600,000. Treat those as its own descriptions of reach.
The interesting number is smaller. An internal leadership roundtable offers a private, two-hour meeting each month, facilitated by an executive coach. A huge audience gives the organization distribution. A small group gives someone room to describe the problem behind the polished conference slide. Both belong in the same business, but they do different work.
Who pays for free?
For an individual product manager, the entrance is straightforward: join for free, read, listen, watch. Product Talk carries interviews with practitioners and executives. The newsletter and video library make their experience portable. Someone wrestling with prioritization can hear how another leader approaches it without buying a course first. The stated mission is to help everyone build great products.
The organization also has corporate customers and sponsors. Its Corporate Alliance offers upskilling, recruiting connections, co-created podcasts and reports, and sponsorship of awards and salons. Walmart’s program, listed as a partnership since 2024, combines strategic PM certification, executive roundtables, and a CPO circle. Capgemini’s listed relationship dates to 2021 and covers CPO awards and programs.
Those arrangements explain the economics more clearly than the word community. The organization’s posted 2025 tax return records approximately $1.82 million in revenue and $1.06 million in expenses. Contributions and grants account for roughly 94 percent of revenue; program services supply the rest. Free public learning sits inside an institution that still has to fund its operations.
The public offering distinguishes free membership from paid mentorship, executive circles, and invitation-only salons. A learner can sample the thinking before an employer commits to a program. A corporate buyer is purchasing something more demanding than access to a recording: feedback, facilitation, and a reason for people to return.
A smaller room, a harder question
Consider the problems the internal roundtable names: uneven skills, teams assembled through acquisitions, shifts in customer segments, and disagreement over processes. These are recognizable workplace conditions. Another framework may help, but applying it requires people to negotiate priorities together. The program describes measurable goals, coaching between meetings, and agendas shaped around outcomes.
That is where Products That Count fits in a crowded market. Mind the Product, Product School, and Reforge are alternative places to seek product learning and professional connections. Products That Count’s particular combination joins a nonprofit publishing operation to corporate team development and professional recognition. Its executive contributors supply material; the broader audience gives that material somewhere to go.
A huge audience can distribute an idea. A small group can ask what happened when you tried it.
Its stated values are respect, grit, and adaptability. For a peer group, those words describe useful operating conditions: listen to another person’s context, stay with an awkward problem, revise a position. That is an interpretation of the design, not evidence that every session achieves it. The design depends on people showing up with something they are willing to examine.
An award becomes a listening device
The awards add another exchange. People submit nominations, an advisory council reviews them, and the organization celebrates the winners. Nominations are free. Products, builders, leaders, and chief product officers receive distinct attention. Recognition attracts participants while also giving the organization a stream of examples to discuss in its publishing.
In July 2026, its Q2 awards coverage focused on fintech, cybersecurity, and healthcare. The accompanying commentary emphasized AI embedded in workflows, verification, and trust. Those are the organization’s readings of its submissions, rather than a census of the market. They are still useful questions for a builder: where does this product sit in a real decision, and why would someone trust it?
In September, Moatti announced that CPO awards would move from annual recognition to three cycles a year. Her explanation pointed to faster development and a changing executive role. The organization was adjusting its own calendar to the behavior it wanted to understand. Even the awards schedule became a product decision.
There is a practical distinction between winning an award and using the process to sharpen judgment. A nomination asks someone to explain the customer, the problem, and the result. Readers can bring those questions back to their own work without treating a winner’s circumstances as universal. A healthcare workflow and a consumer app may need very different evidence before either deserves another feature.
Borrow the meeting, then do the work
Adaptation has precedent here. In a pandemic-era ebook foreword, Moatti thanked chapter heads and podcast hosts for moving programming entirely online overnight. The gathering place had become unusable. The exchange of experience could continue through another channel. That is the documented disruption worth learning from: identify the useful activity before deciding which format must survive.
A reader can borrow the smaller mechanism immediately. Bring one live decision to a recurring peer meeting. Name an outcome, use a facilitator, then return with what changed. Choose colleagues who can discuss context honestly. Advice travels poorly when nobody has authority to act, when confidentiality prevents candor, or when attendance replaces experimentation. Products That Count gives people places to learn. The next product decision still belongs to the person listening.