I'm in agreement with pretty much everything @crazygringo has said.
I don't know if this will help, but if I can offer a clarification on why I think product-led id not synonymous to "customer-led" or "market led" is that it's not simply finding and responding to market demands.
You have different types of product managers (f. ex. I am kind of excluding "technical product managers" from this characterization), but typically, product needs to own and understand what customers want BUT be able to understand the tradeoffs, factor in what delivering that value actually entails* AND assess the opportunity cost of pursuing these features vs 1 000 000 possible ideas.
This is typically not the job of sales managers, engineering managers or marketing managers, etc. So product is the function that uses market demands + input from all these other managers, gets buy-in and then helps things go smoothly.
* Building a feature is only part of the cost of a feature. It has to be marketed, it has to be maintained, it has to be improved, etc.
I don't know if this will help, but if I can offer a clarification on why I think product-led id not synonymous to "customer-led" or "market led" is that it's not simply finding and responding to market demands.
You have different types of product managers (f. ex. I am kind of excluding "technical product managers" from this characterization), but typically, product needs to own and understand what customers want BUT be able to understand the tradeoffs, factor in what delivering that value actually entails* AND assess the opportunity cost of pursuing these features vs 1 000 000 possible ideas.
This is typically not the job of sales managers, engineering managers or marketing managers, etc. So product is the function that uses market demands + input from all these other managers, gets buy-in and then helps things go smoothly.
* Building a feature is only part of the cost of a feature. It has to be marketed, it has to be maintained, it has to be improved, etc.