Most product managers don’t realize that the way they’re presenting is quietly signaling that they’re not ready for leadership.

They’ll bring clean slides, sharp charts, and beautiful frameworks.

But they end up failing the one test that matters most to executives.

After 30+ years in product and business leadership, including over a decade in executive roles, I learned something quickly:

In senior rooms, every sentence you say signals one of two things:

The difference isn’t intelligence or polish.

It’s how you communicate.

In executive rooms, polish isn’t what earns trust.

Business fluency does.

I see this pattern all the time.

A Product Manager is presenting to executives and wants to impress them by proving they’ve done the work.

So they bring:

And they wrap it in a beautiful deck.

I get it: You want to look good. You want to be prepared. You don’t want to feel exposed if they ask a question that you don’t have the answer to.

The problem is that signals support. Not leadership.

Because what you’re quietly telling them about yourself is that you’re focused on the information, not the decisions.

Executives aren’t asking: “How much analysis did you do?”

They’re asking: “Can you decide what matters?”

If you can’t prioritize the signal over the noise, why would they trust you to lead?

This is the difference between PMs who are empowered to lead vs. those who get told what to do.

So, today, I’ll show you a better way. This approach will help you keep execs locked in and position you as the strategic thinker in the room, not just the person who did the work.

Executives care about three things:

If your presentation doesn’t clearly drive toward those, you may be informative, but you’re not yet leadership-ready.

Here’s the structure I’ve used for years in exec meetings, strategy reviews, and investment discussions.

It works for:

Remove:

Executives don’t need to warm up.

They need to know the point. Immediately.

So, get to it.

Your first sentence should answer the question that’s top-most on executives’ minds:

Why should we care?

So, you need to start with a strong hook that communicates why this is important to them — in other words, why it’s relevant for the business.

It’s actually easier than it sounds.

You create a strong hook follows this pattern:

We have the opportunity to [business outcome] by [specific action that you’ll explain].

Example:

Notice what that does:

Now executives are leaning in. Not because your slides are pretty. But because the stakes are clear.

So, how do you create the right hook?

Start by picking something your audience cares about — a business problem with a clear opportunity or outcome, in this case.

Through my career, I’ve been collecting all the benefits that executives care about, and I’ve put them into a toolkit that I use for any executive level conversation. Based on my topic, I pick the most relevant and construct the hook accordingly.

You can download my toolkit for free at the end of this article. 👇

Yes, executives want data. What they don’t want is endless data. They want clarity.

What you need to do is change the framing so executives immediately recognize the strategic value of what you’re doing.

I know this works because it’s the same thing I’ve taught thousands of other PMs and why I’ve been trusted to lead multi-million dollar product portfolios.

I once did a project for a health-tech company in which I couldn’t get the leadership team to listen to me no matter how much data or reports I brought to solve the problem. They would ignore them, yet would continue to pressure me to find a solution.

The next time I went to them, I presented only what I thought was the key to getting the outcome I needed. I cut the slide deck down from 25 slides to a single page of paper.

In the next meeting, they came to a decision quickly and praised me for how innovative the solution was. This massively boosted their trust in me.

And the crazy thing was it was all just the exact same thing I’d been telling them for weeks! Only this time, I’d framed it differently.

What I learned was that it isn’t narrative or data that executives want.

What they want is tangible business outcomes.

And I'll show you how you can provide those outcomes by using a narrative arc.

Every story has a narrative arc that follows the same 4-part structure. whether it’s Lord of the Rings, a John Grisham novel, or your next executive communication:

The Tension part is where you provide the information following the opening hook. But the Tension part is the one everyone often gets wrong. Because their instinct is to provide as much detail as possible.

Do not do this.

The goal of this section is to build up to a key message that you’re trying to share. But when you overload execs with too many details, you’re not building toward anything.

You end up coming across directionless, leading to your audience wondering why any of this matters and why they’re even there.

They tune out, which exposes you as someone who’s not strategic or leadership material.

So, instead of presenting 18 slides, once you’ve got their attention from the hook, choose 2-3 key messages that guide your audience toward the key insight you’re trying to share.

For the retailer servicing project, the hook I gave them was:

Think about your own reaction to that. You immediately have questions:

And this is exactly the point. A strong hook will create questions your audience will want answers to. And this positions you perfectly to deliver your core message.

Once you have their attention with your hook, you don’t need to throw all the details at them. Your job now is to provide answers to the questions you provided with the hook.

This instantly positions you as more strategic.

For example, if you say:

“We can increase expansion revenue by 12% this year by fixing three friction points in our enterprise onboarding flow.”

You can answer the logical questions that come from it:

That’s enough.

You’ve built tension. You’ve shown causality. You’ve framed the problem in business terms.

That’s exactly what I did with the health-tech project. I didn’t give tons of detail on customer LTV, churn rates, TAM, and acquisition costs. All I did was provide 3 insight that answered the obvious questions I had set up with my book — that customer satisfaction was down, the accounts at risk, and how our product usage were being eroded by a competitor, impacting our core unit economics.

Framing the problem in business terms shows you’re thinking like a business operator, not a feature owner.

This allows you to move to step 4.

This is where many PMs hesitate.

They present insights. Then they ask, “What do you think?”

Executives expect YOU to take a position.

A strong recommendation includes two parts:

For example:

That’s not a suggestion. That’s demonstrating leadership.

For the health-tech company, I said there’s one thing we needed to do, which was the action they needed to take. I then explained that this one thing was what are most at-risk customers complained about the most — so that was my reason for why I recommended the action. Then, I explained the benefits for pursuing the action.

The way I construct this is I use one of the benefit templates from my toolkit, pick the most relevant benefits for my proposal, and combine it with one of the templates from the hook back.

This is what brings you to step 5.

Never leave momentum on the table. Close with:

For example:

Now you’re not just presenting. You’re moving the business.

This storytelling structure works not just for presentations. It works for reports, pitches, emails, project updates, or any sort of business communication.

When you communicate like this, executives begin to see you differently.

Not as:

But as:

And that’s when bigger opportunities appear.

Using this structure will elevate your work from merely informative to decision driving by using strategic thinking.

Career advancement rarely happens because of prettier slides.

They happen because leaders believe you can think at the next level.

Every time you present, you’re answering an unspoken question:

“Could this person run a bigger piece of the business?”

If your communication is:

Over time, “maybe” turns into “yes.”

And that’s how product managers become leaders faster than their peers.

Not by talking more. By deciding better, and communicating like someone who owns the outcome.

So, bookmark this article and re-read it before your next executive meeting to help you with the right strategic thinking pattern. Download my toolkit below to demonstrate leadership-level thinking.

Before you know it, you’ll be put on the fast track for bigger opportunities.

That’s all for this week.

Have a joyful week, and, if you can, make it joyful for someone else too.

cheers,
shardul

Shardul Mehta
I ❤️ product managers.

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