The president of NatCare (name changed) issued a high-stakes challenge:

Grow the business from $30 million to $55 million in annual revenue in the next 18 months.

To get there, he demanded an “InSight Killer” strategy — a plan built specifically to beat their biggest competitor.

The product team panicked. They thought they needed months of new research and a brand-new roadmap. Discovery calls were set up. Brainstorming meetings were scheduled. Miro boards were drawn.

But then their product leader looked closer at their backlog and discovered something surprising. The ingredients for success were already there.

It was a messy pantry filled with “raw ingredients” — random tickets, user stories, and half-baked features. They just didn’t have a recipe.

Their first attempt was exactly as you’d expect. Like most product teams, their first instinct was to organize the chaos. They grouped related items together. Created themes. Built epics. Applied prioritization frameworks. Rearranged the backlog into something more manageable.

In other words, they took a messy pantry and turned it into a neatly organized bag of groceries.

Better. But still not dinner.

The product leader realized something important. Handing the president a bag of groceries wasn’t going to sell.

So they took another pass.

This time, they assembled the work into a polished product proposal. The presentation looked great. It was packed with features, capabilities, screenshots, and roadmap items.

The meeting was a disaster.

The president wasn't asking for a product description. He was asking for a growth strategy.

The team had taken the groceries and arranged them neatly on a cafeteria tray. All the ingredients were there, but nobody could see the meal.

They explained what they wanted to build.

They failed to explain how it would grow the business.

The product leader realized the problem wasn't the roadmap. The problem was the story.

The team was presenting a collection of features. The president was looking for a business investment proposal.

So they stopped talking about screens, workflows, and capabilities.

Instead, they reorganized the work into a handful of Fundable Units, each answering the questions executives actually cared about:

The underlying features barely changed. It was the framing that changed completely.

What had looked like a disconnected collection of product ideas now looked like a focused growth strategy capable of generating $10M-$15M in business impact.

The bag of groceries had become a signature dish.

When they presented it a second time, the reaction was immediate. The president approved the initiative.

Not because the features were different. Because the team had finally explained why the investment mattered.

By organizing those existing features into a business case with a commercial investment thesis, they had created a signature dish that executives loved.

Most product teams would look at the NatCare story and conclude that the problem was the backlog. It wasn’t.

The backlog was fine. The problem was that the product team and the executive team were having completely different conversations.

Product teams love to talk about features, backlogs, prioritization frameworks, and roadmaps. The rest of the business talks about growth, retention, profitability, risk, and company goals.

One side is discussing what gets built. The other is discussing what drives the business.

That’s why so many roadmap reviews feel frustrating. Product presents a list of work. Executives ask questions that seem unrelated. Both sides leave feeling misunderstood.

The problem gets worse when you look at what teams actually measure. Product teams often track delivery dates, velocity, adoption, and feature releases. Executives are watching revenue, margins, retention, and growth. They’re operating from completely different scorecards.

The result is a lot of activity that creates very little perceived value.

One CPO audited a year of delivered work and found that 75% of it didn't move the needle. Not because the team was lazy or the work was poorly executed. The work simply wasn’t connected to a meaningful business outcome.

These are what I call Orphans: backlog items, projects, and initiatives that risk consuming time, money, and attention but don’t clearly support a company goal.

And most product teams have far more of them than they realize.

The problem isn’t that product leaders aren’t smart enough. The problem is that most product leaders were trained for a different job.

You learned discovery, roadmaps, prioritization, Agile, product strategy templates, and development coordination.

All useful skills.

But very few product leaders are ever taught how the business actually works.

This is where business fluency comes in.

Business fluency isn’t just knowing business terms. It’s not memorizing finance jargon or learning how to read a P&L.

Business fluency is the ability to connect product investments to business outcomes.

It’s understanding how customers buy, how the company grows, what drives profitability, and how your roadmap contributes to those goals.

One Director of Product Management who attended our Business Fluency for Product Leaders training put it this way:

I think that’s exactly right.

Many product leaders believe they have an influence or communication problem when what they really have is a knowledge problem.

You can’t connect your work to business outcomes if you don’t understand the business model. You can’t influence investment decisions if you don’t understand how investments are evaluated. And you can’t lead the business if you don't understand what drives it.

The strange part is that we often treat these skills as optional. Or unsexy.

They’re not.

The higher you move in product leadership, the more critical they become.

As one experienced product leader put it to me in a recent coaching call:

And that’s the challenge.

Many of you were taught how to build products. Far fewer were taught how to help build the business.

That gap is business fluency.

One participant summarized it perfectly:

And they’re right.

The higher you move in product leadership, the less your success depends on product expertise alone and the more it depends on your ability to think and operate like a business leader.

Business fluency isn’t about learning new terminology or a new process. It’s about changing how you think about product decisions.

Here are four shifts that can dramatically improve how you lead.

Stop looking at your roadmap as a collection of features. Start looking at it through the lens of your company’s revenue architecture.

Every major initiative should have a clear connection to how the business acquires customers, retains them, expands accounts, or improves profitability. If you can’t explain where an initiative fits, you need to question its merit.

To do this well, you need to understand how the business makes money. How do customers discover you? Why do they choose you? What drives retention? What creates expansion revenue? Which metrics matter most to the executive team?

When you understand the path from customer awareness to revenue, retention, and growth, you can start seeing where product can have the greatest impact.

Most roadmap conversations are really conversations about features and dates.

Here’s the dirty secret:

Executives don’t care about features nearly as much as product teams think they do.

Instead of talking about what you’ll build, talk about the outcomes you’re trying to create, the assumptions that must be true, the upside you’re pursuing, and the risks you’re taking. This turns a feature request into an investment discussion.

The goal isn’t to win an argument about a feature.

The goal is to make a compelling investment case.

Executives don’t fund features. They fund business outcomes.

Many backlogs contain initiatives that sound important but aren’t connected to any meaningful business objective. I call those Orphans.

Every major investment should have a clear connection to the company scorecard — a top-line business goal, a financial metric, or a strategic priority.

When you map your investments against the company scorecard, gaps become obvious. You can see where you’re over-investing, under-investing, or carrying work that doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the business.

This is one of the fastest ways to expose waste and create alignment.

Most prioritization frameworks work reasonably well inside a product team. They tend to fall apart in executive discussions.

When the CEO wants growth, Finance wants margin, Customer Success wants retention, and Sales wants a strategic customer feature, weighted scoring models rarely settle the debate.

Business-fluent product leaders approach these conversations differently.

They define success criteria before work begins. They define stopping conditions before resources are committed. And when priorities change, they don’t argue about projects, features, or team allocations. They discuss business outcome commitments.

The conversation shifts from “Which project should we prioritize?” to “Which outcome matters most right now, and what are we willing to trade to achieve it?”

That’s where better decisions get made.

You don’t need a new title to start operating differently. Try one of these this week:

These are small changes. But they lead to very different conversations.

Product management has spent decades trying to earn a seat at the table. Maybe we’ve been asking for the wrong seat?

Business leaders don’t get invited because they manage roadmaps. They get invited because they help grow the business.

Most product leaders are glorified roadmap managers.
The best product leaders help manage the business.

Which one are you becoming?

Ask yourself:

If your roadmap disappeared tomorrow, would the company miss the features... or miss the business outcomes?

Your answer tells you everything you need to know.

Over the past year, Mike Smart and I have been working with product leaders to help them connect product strategy, roadmaps, and investments directly to business outcomes.

That’s why we created the Business Fluency Masterclass for Product Leaders, a live cohort-based workshop designed for Directors, VPs, and Heads of Product.

If today’s article resonated with you, take a look:

The next cohort begins in July and space is limited.

That’s it for today.

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

cheers,
shardul

Shardul Mehta
I ❤️ product managers.

​Follow me on LinkedIn