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Years ago, as a newly minted product leader, the CEO asked me to update our reporting feature,
“We have an Executive Account Review with Big Customer Z in a month,” he shared. “I just got off a call with them and the lack of visibility into Metric X has been a real sore point for them.”
“It’s imperative this meeting is successful,” he stressed. “We just need a handful of fields added to the existing report. That should solve the problem.”
And then it came:
“Can we get those fields added in the next three weeks so I have time to review the output before the meeting?”
I took a deep breath. Then launched into my answer:
“That would jeopardize the current projects we’re working on and delay Release Elephant. We agreed that projects Dog, Cat, and Mouse would be the priorities for this month. If we move away from those now, Account Management will be upset. Besides, it will take some time to identify the right set of requirements. We should talk to other customers to see if this is a need for them too. Then we’ll need to take it through our prioritization process, followed by grooming to get a story point assessment and schedule it for a sprint.”
Guess what happened?
We ended up doing it anyway.
The CEO just went directly to the CTO and pressured him to do it.
I had lost credibility. I had taught the CEO that it was just best to go to the CTO directly to make things happen.
Where did I fail?
I didn’t speak the language of MONEY.
CEOs Think in Money, Not Features
Your CEO knows which are your most profitable products.
They understand how the business works, how your product flows through the business to customers, and how that process makes money for the company.
When making decisions and communicating, they don’t use fancy terminology.
They stick to the fundamentals of business — i.e., the basics of money making:
Growing profitably
ROI and cash generation
Satisfying customer needs better than competitors
This focus guides everything:
Setting company priorities
Identifying gaps and flaws in the business model
Evaluating new business opportunities
Pursuing the best bets by taking what already exists and combining it in a different way to fill a market need
You may be nodding along because intuitively this makes sense. And, yet, when PMs open their mouths, they don’t speak to any of these.
The Disconnect: Product Speak vs. Money Speak
PMs live in the world of requirements, stories, personas, prioritization, backlogs, sprints, engineering capacity, UI/UX, tech debt, and releases.
And, as a result, you speak an entirely different language than the CEO.
All of these things may be operationally relevant. And your CEO gets that. But they also don’t care.
That’s why you need to learn how to translate your work into language your CEO (and other executives) actually care about.
This one thing can be the difference in:
Getting your proposals approved
Earning credibility
Being appreciated
Gaining a promotion
So today I’m going to talk about the 3 things your CEO cares about and how you can connect your work to them.
What You’ll Learn Today:
CEOs don’t actually care about the craft of product management
CEO speak — and how to translate
CEO metrics and compensation — and how they shape their thinking
The power of Economic Storytelling for Product Managers
Real-world example
Career benefits for Product Managers
PLUS:
Companion Learning Guides (paid subscribers):
Briefing doc
Study guide and glossary of key terms
Premium Career Development Toolkit (Inner Circle Members only):
15-min audio podcast
5-min video explainer
CEO Communication Playbook
Disruptive Exec Request Triage Playbook
Product→Money Translation Framework
Product Investment Proposal Template (for exec buy-in)
What Your CEO Cares About
1. Growth
Your CEO’s #1 goal is growth.
Increasing revenue profitability in a sustainable way. Year over year.
It’s what they’re held accountable for. And their own compensation is typically tied to it.
Examples:
In a VC-backed company, the CEO’s bonus may be tied to hitting a revenue number.
In a private equity owned company, the CEO’s compensation is often tied to achieving specific company objectives related to growth and profitability.
Public companies often tie the CEO’s compensation to the company's stock performance.
This means the CEO’s wealth is directly tied to the company’s performance. If the company does well (revenue and profit), its valuation goes up, and so does the CEO’s compensation.
Your CEO also knows that the best growth is often:
Organic — flowing naturally out of what the company is already doing
Differentiated — not a commodity and not easily replicated by competitors
So when you come to your CEO with a proposal or response, they’re looking to see how what you’re saying and doing helps with the company’s growth goals, as either organic or differentiated growth.
2. ROI and Cash Generation
Cash keeps the business alive. Cash pays for three things:
Cash first pays for operating expenses — the lights, the lease, the janitorial services, your paycheck, your benefits, your chair, the All Hands, the free snacks you enjoy, the travel and meal reimbursements, all of it.
Then cash pays for taxes and any interest payments on money borrowed by the business.
After that, if there’s any cash left over, it can be used to re-invest in the business:
Develop a new product
Build new manufacturing or production ability
Scale operations
Acquire another company
Note that in a public company, cash can also be used as a return to investors in the form of dividend payouts.
Your CEO (and CFO) are tracking cash and the ability to generate cash very closely. Cash generation can be tracked as return on invested capital (ROI) = net profit margin * velocity.
Velocity here does not mean Agile sprint velocity. Sprint velocity is a measure of how much an Agile team can produce during one normal sprint cycle.
Velocity, in business terms, means speed to cash generation. A.k.a., margin velocity.
So, margin velocity means:
The more margin grows, the more cash the company generates.
The faster the business achieves profitability, the faster the business can generate that cash. That’s the velocity part.
In a physical goods company, inventory velocity (turnover) is critical to cash generation. The longer a physical good isn’t sold, the longer it takes to turn the investment in that product into cash.
In a software company, your CEO may find sprint velocity interesting from a productivity standpoint, but ultimately doesn’t really care. If you really love sprint velocity, what will really get your CEO’s attention is if you can materially connect sprint velocity to how it helps accelerate time-to-revenue while reducing time-to-development. (This is the part most Agile advocates fail at.)
The faster a feature is delivered to a customer, the sooner revenue can be recognized and ROI can be achieved on the investment that went into the development of that feature.
There are two parts to this ROI:
Product development
Sales enablement
The longer it takes to develop a product or feature, the greater the investment required and the longer it takes to generate revenue (cash).
Similarly, the quicker marketing and sales can be ramped up, the easier it is for them to sell the product and get it into customers’ hands.
This is why CEOs are often focused on investing into sales enablement. It’s totally worth it.
And this is also why they’re always focused on pushing for shorter development timelines and quicker releases. Because the faster you can go from concept to launch, the quicker the ROI.
3. Customers
Your CEO knows which customers are the most profitable, how satisfied they are, and which segments are most strategically (i.e., financially) important.
Your CEO knows your customer’s business intimately. And they know how your product will lead to quantifiable improvements for customers.
Your CEO is focused on trying to satisfy customer needs better than the competition (differentiation) in two ways:
By taking advantage of what the company is already good at doing — because this is usually a more cost effective approach that leads to better margins.
By building new capabilities that create new advantages over the competition.
Your product decisions need to tie directly to these customer outcomes that impact the business.
Speak in Customer and Money Stories, Not Features
Notice what’s missing from the list above: Agile, scrum, SAFe, waterfall, Kanban, personas, story points, usability, design thinking, product metrics, “product sense,” “product thinking,” having a “product mindset” — all the things you’ve been told to covet as a Product Manager.
Your “north star” metric? Well, your CEO’s north star is profitable growth.
What this means is that the things you sweat as a Product Manager are means to an end. Your job is to connect those means to the end goal of profitable growth.
So, in order to have an influence, you need to:
Learn how your company’s business model works — how it makes money and how your product helps do that.
Learn your customer’s business — i.e., how their business model works.
Understand how your product meaningfully impacts your customers — beyond just user satisfaction and usage.
Tie your product activities and product metrics to business outcomes.
Message proposals, responses, and recommendations in economic terms.
How I Should Have Responded
Instead of outlining process steps, I should have said:
“Big Customer Z is $450K in ARR, so I get the importance here. You may recall, we’re currently working on Dog, Cat, and Mouse, which are meant to cut our long customer implementation cycles by half, enabling 5 more clients this year and $5M in top-line revenue.
“So implementing this change would delay Release Elephant by, I’m guessing, 3-4 weeks (again, to be verified with Engineering), risking a $1M revenue delay. With due respect to the customer sensitivity here, I recommend we prioritize Release Elephant and implement this after.”
This would have done:
Shown I understood the business priorities
Maintained my credibility with the CEO
Strengthened the CTO’s trust for triaging requests through PM
Your Takeaway
By learning to speak in economic terms — to speak in “money stories” — you’ll be better positioned to:
Get your recommendations approved
Gain respect and credibility
Be seen as a valued partner
Improve your chances for career advancement
See you next Saturday.
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:
Strategy Design Workshop: Transform scattered priorities into clear, actionable direction. I’ll facilitate your team through a customized workshop to align stakeholders and create strategies that actually get executed instead of forgotten. Book a call.
Product Management Audit: Get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s holding your team back. Through a systematic analysis, I’ll evaluate your strategy, processes, roles, metrics, and culture. You’ll walk away a practical set of findings and actionable recommendations to strengthen your product organization. Book a call.
Corporate Training: Elevate your entire product organization. I’ll teach your team how to think and act strategically, craft outcome-driven roadmaps, and dramatically improve how they deliver measurable results that matter to your business. Book a call.
Improv Based Team Building Workshop: Boost creativity, trust, and collaboration through improv. Your team will problem-solve faster and work better together. Book a call.
Shardul Mehta
I ❤️ product managers.