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Over the past few months, I talked with more than 25 CPOs, VPs of Product, CEOs, and investors. Different industries, companies, and stages of growth. And a pattern kept showing up that surprised me.
Product Management is losing its influence.
But not because of AI. Or because building products is getting easier. Or even because strategy is getting harder.
Product Management is losing influence because the ELT and boards are losing execution confidence.
Not in its ability to ship.
In its ability to materially impact the business.
As one CPO was told in a board meeting:
Great. You just spent $16 million on product development. I don’t know what you did with it.”
The Problem: Product Management is Still Running a Delivery Playbook
Most product organizations are still operating as delivery functions.
Roadmaps. Backlogs. Release plans. Shipping. Velocity. Usage metrics.
That used to be enough. The charter used to be about shipping and improving product.
It’s not anymore. At the executive level, the scoreboard for PM is changing.
Today product leaders are expected to answer questions like:
How does this drive revenue?
What impact does this have on our margins?
What risk are we taking on?
Why does this deserve continued investment?
That’s not delivery.
That’s capital allocation.
Here’s a story.
A product leader proposed a solution that would cut 20% of the company’s support costs. That got everyone’s attention.
But their proposal failed. Why?
There were two critical elements missing:
A currency symbol attached to the savings.
How investing in that effort helped the company achieve their financial targets.
The product leader had failed to demonstrate how their brilliant idea helped drive profitable revenue for the company.
Many product leaders have not been trained for this shift.
They walk into executive reviews armed with feature slides, usage metrics, sprint team assignments, and capacity plans.
Meanwhile, the rest of the C-suite is thinking about revenue, margin, and capital efficiency.
Different language. Different scoreboard.
That’s where the credibility gap starts.
One CEO put it to me this way:
There’s a generation of product leaders who are really just managers of Jira ticket monkeys with titles. They’re mainly just sitting there overseeing backlog scrubbing and grooming. That is not product management.”
The Credibility Gap Crisis in Product Management
When product leaders can’t connect the roadmap to the business model, a few things happen. (None of them are good.)
The product strategy is second guessed.
Priorities get re-litigated — decisions don’t stick.
Fragile stakeholder alignment.
Proof of value and contribution of product work is unclear.
All this leads to a perception that the product work is disconnected from financial outcomes important to the business.
When that happens, the organization faces decision drag, executive bottlenecks, and lack of ELT buy-in, leading to:
Missed market timing
Delayed revenue
Misallocated investment due to too many initiatives
Underinvestment in high-leverage bets
And cross-functional drag (go-to-market misalignment)
Guess who gets blamed?
Product Management.
And here’s the really bitter pill PM folks will need to swallow.
Product folks can no longer blame this on a lack of a “product mindset” on the part of leadership, or a lack of understanding of how to “do product the right way.”
“Roadmap amnesia is real. Because CPOs are living, breathing, and dying the roadmap day in and day out. But not everybody else does. And that’s not their job.”
The new scoreboard is about growth, revenue, margin, and execution confidence.
When the Product Roadmap Collides with Business Reality
These problems show up in real companies every day. Here are a few examples that came up in my conversations with leaders.
The Question That Killed the Roadmap
The Division President of a $500 million business sat in on a roadmap planning meeting with PM and Engineering.
The team walked through their plans.
What to build.
What to prioritize.
How the work would be sequenced.
How much effort each initiative would take.
They discussed dependencies.
Architecture.
Technical constraints.
Everything looked well thought out.
Finally, he asked one question:
“How does all this translate to revenue?”
The room went quiet.
No one had an answer.
He stood up.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m taking the money back.”
And he walked out.
Meeting over.
The roadmap looked solid.
The engineering plan was detailed.
But without a clear connection to the business, it wasn’t a strategy.
It was just activity.
The Sales Compensation Disaster
Another company launched a new capability they were excited about.
Engineering delivered. Product shipped. The feature worked perfectly.
And it completely failed.
Why?
Because it conflicted with how the sales team was paid.
Selling the new product meant earning less commission than selling the old one.
So guess what happened.
Sales never sold it.
The product team had built something that made perfect technical and customer sense.
But they never checked the economic incentives inside the business.
A sales guy is going to be like, a dollar is a dollar. I don't give a rat’s ass about retiring a particular product’s quota. I will bring home $1.8 million because that’s my quota.”
The Roadmap That Missed the Market
One CPO’s company was building products for a new business area with a strict seasonal buying cycle. Miss the window, and you wait another 12 months to sell anything.
One of her senior product managers was building the roadmap. Smart person. Someone she respected.
But the roadmap had a fatal flaw.
The PM was prioritizing work based on when she wanted to ship features. Not when the market needed them.
The plan made sense from a development perspective.
It made no sense from a commercial one.
The CPO stepped in.
“If this doesn’t reach General Availability before the buying window,” she said, “we miss the entire year.”
No deals.
No revenue.
Just a 12-month delay.
She explained that business-fluent PMs work backwards from the sale, not forward from the backlog.
Start with the commercial reality:
When does the product need to be implemented?
So when does the deal need to be signed?
So when must the product be ready to demo?
Only then do you build the roadmap.
A roadmap can’t just reflect when the product team wants to ship code.
A roadmap has to align with how the business actually sells.
Your definition of done is not you released a feature. Until it’s been acquired, adopted, and we’re showing impact, you’re actually not done. Delivery simply gives you the right to go and prove impact.”
Budget Season: The Quiet Political Sport
Another pattern every experienced product leader knows well.
Budget season.
If you walk into the executive meeting expecting alignment to happen in the room, you’re already behind.
The smart leaders do something different.
They calibrate before the meeting.
Finance first.
Then sales.
Then engineering.
By the time the full ELT discussion happens, the hard debates have already happened privately.
Without that preparation, the meeting becomes a traffic jam of objections.
When you talk to a CFO about your roadmap, and you explain the phases and the features and the capabilities, the CFO could care two hoots about all of that.”
The Consequences: Product Becomes a Feature Factory
When product strategy isn’t tied to the business model, the consequences spread quickly.
At the team level, PMs start drifting into the Jira ticket monkey trap.
They spend their time grooming backlogs, writing user stories, managing tickets, running standups.
Not market-shaping work.
As a result, the business connection disappears.
Without a clear outcome scoreboard, chaos creeps in. Everyone interprets priorities differently. Accountability gets fuzzy. And when disagreements happen, the only way to resolve them is escalation.
The CEO becomes the final decision maker on everything. That creates a permanent bottleneck.
At the business level, the damage gets worse.
High-impact bets get underfunded.
Resources get spread across too many small initiatives.
Market windows close before the company moves.
Revenue shows up later than planned.
And eventually, executive trust fades.
Once that trust drops, product stops being treated like a line function. It becomes a staff function. Supporting the business instead of driving it.
That’s when product influence really starts shrinking.
“The ELT and board don’t really care to understand what the “good” product practice is. They want them to be thinking about growth, revenue, margin. But when all they hear is about product craft, we shouldn’t be surprised when they start talking to them like an extension of engineering. And now the product leader becomes a project manager, not a true leader.”
From Feature Factory to Capital Allocator
Fixing this requires a major shift.
Product leaders need to stop thinking like delivery managers.
And start operating like portfolio operators.
That means seeing the roadmap differently.
Not as a list of features. But as a set of investable bets.
Each bet should answer a simple question:
Why does this deserve investment?
Before the first line of code gets written,
before the first set of requirements are laid out,
strong product leaders are already asking:
What commercial outcome are we targeting?
What assumptions must be true?
What risk are we taking?
How will we know if this works?
This changes the conversation completely.
Instead of debating features, the team debates return profiles.
Instead of arguing opinions, they analyze investment cases.
And instead of chasing output, they focus on outcomes.
Everyone in the PE world speaks likes this and now so do VCs. They aren’t looking for someone strong in agile or writing good requirements. They want a portfolio owner, a capital allocator. It’s all about EBITDA.”
A New Operating Standard for Product Leadership
If you want product decisions to stick under pressure, a few things have to change.
1. Speak the economic language of the business.
Every product leader should understand:
how the company makes money
how customer acquisition works
what drives retention
what drives margin
Without that knowledge, product will always struggle in executive conversations.
2. Turn roadmap items into investable bets.
Every initiative should have:
a clear business goal
an estimated impact
a risk profile
a time window to prove itself
This changes roadmap conversations instantly.
3. Define kill criteria before you start.
High-performing teams define exit conditions up front.
They agree on things like:
adoption floors
revenue thresholds
proof timelines
If those signals don’t appear, the initiative stops.
That prevents slow failure and wasted capital.
4. Take a number
This is the moment many product leaders avoid. (Are afraid of?)
Taking a number means saying:
“This initiative should drive $X.”
Or:
“This should protect Y% of revenue.”
When product leaders take a number, they stop being support roles.
They become business operators.
When you ask product leaders, “Who is your team?”, they’ll almost always say the product team. That’s incorrect. Your team is the ELT now.”
If you’re leading a product organization and trying to move toward this model, I can help.
Eliminating cross-functional drag
Grounding product strategy in explicit financial narratives
Building a scalable decision discipline
Improving go-to-market coordination
Bridge the credibility gap with the C-suite
Shift from shipping velocity to commercial outcomes
If that’s the challenge you’re dealing with right now, let’s talk.
What Product Leaders Should Do Next
If you take nothing else from this article, remember this.
Product leadership is changing.
And the shift is happening fast.
The new expectation requires a tight line to business outcome and financial results.
Here are a few practical steps to start making the transition.
Learn the business model. Know how your company makes money.
Connect every initiative to a commercial outcome. No outcome, no investment.
Frame roadmap work as bets, not features.
Define lock, adjust, and kill criteria before launch.
Practice explaining your roadmap in financial terms.
Treat roadmap resets as capital allocation decisions.
Take ownership of the number.
Because when product leaders start operating this way, something interesting happens.
Decisions stick.
Executive trust grows.
And the product function moves from delivery center to growth engine.
Join Our Live Lightning Lesson
On March 19 at 12pm ET, Mike Smart and I are hosting a live Maven Lightning Lesson for product leaders:
We’ll walk through how experienced product leaders:
Frame initiatives as investable bets.
Force real tradeoffs instead of political debates.
Reallocate capital, not just teams.
Install Lock / Adjust / Kill criteria to reduce escalation.
It’s live, interactive, and free. If you're responsible for leading product, you should join us.
If you’re feeling any of this, I promise you, you’re not alone.
Across every conversation I’ve had with product leaders lately, one thing is clear:
The future of product leadership isn’t about shipping faster.
It’s about allocating capital smarter.
That’s all for today.
Have a joyful week, and, if you can, make it joyful for someone else too.
cheers,
shardul
Here are 4 ways I can help you today:
Executives: Eliminate Decision Drag and Drive Commercial Impact. I help organizations build the product strategy and discipline need to turn technology into a high-margin business. Let’s discuss your next phase of growth. Schedule a Call Today.
Product Leaders: Bridge the Credibility Gap with the C-suite. Shift your team’s focus from shipping velocity to commercial outcomes. Let’s discuss how to elevate your team’s impact and execution confidence. Book a Call Today.
Product Managers: Get 1:1 Street Smart Career Guidance. From 1:1 coaching to a resume review to a mock interview, get real-world strategic feedback from an executive who has hired, mentored, and promoted at every level, whether you’re breaking into PM or are rising to the leadership ranks. Book a Session Today.
Aspiring and New PMs: Is Product Management Really Right For You? It’s one of the most misunderstood roles in tech. It can be a meaningful role for the right people. But only when entered with realistic expectations, self-awareness, and intent. Get the unvarnished truth about the role before you commit your time, money, and entire career. Join Here Today.
Shardul Mehta
I ❤️ product managers.