I’ve been thinking about how product management has changed over the past few years. Not the tools or the methodologies as those shift all the time, but the fundamental expectations of the role.
The clearest signal I’ve seen is in roadmap reviews. Five years ago, you could get investment for a feature by demonstrating user demand and technical feasibility. Now, those are just prerequisites. The actual conversation is about business impact: what problem this solves, how we’ll measure it, what happens to the numbers if we don’t do it.
This isn’t about bad PMs suddenly becoming good ones. Most PMs I work with understand their users and their product deeply. What’s shifted is that business outcomes aren’t something you address after you’ve designed the product anymore. They’re where you have to start.
The Shift That’s Happened
There’s limited tolerance now for products that don’t justify themselves commercially. Whether you’re at a startup or working at scale, B2B or B2C, the question is the same: what business problem does this solve and how will we measure whether it’s worked?
I’ve done product at Google, ran an agency, and now lead product at Hilo. Across those contexts, the PMs with real influence aren’t necessarily the ones with the best roadmaps or the most features shipped. They’re the ones who can sit down with finance, sales, or operations and actually understand what matters to them. Are we constantly asking too much of our product managers? Probably but times changes, climates fluctuate and it is not about overloading but more selecting where you need to be aware of ‘what’s next’ as a PM. One minute it’s moving your head into the UX space – knowing what good looks like in terms of design, being across the latest AI tools but one thing is for sure – running any company often boils down to whether you can continue – and that’s business 101.
What This Looks Like
This doesn’t mean every PM owns revenue. That’s often not realistic. It means learning to frame product decisions in business terms.
Some examples:
When you say “We’re adding search functionality because users asked for it,” you could instead say “Search should reduce support tickets by about 20%, saving us roughly £40K annually and making customers more self-sufficient, which helps NPS.”
When you say “This architectural refactor will reduce technical debt,” you could say “This refactor cuts our release cycle from three weeks to five days, so we can respond to competitors faster and test revenue-generating features more frequently.”
The product itself hasn’t changed. You’ve just connected it to the business outcome.
What’s Actually in Your Control
Product managers do control the business story of their work. You might not set the revenue target, but you control how your work contributes to it. The ways this usually plays out:
Revenue growth from new features or expanding into new markets. Cost savings from more efficient platforms or API usage. Retention improvements that reduce churn and increase lifetime value. Productivity gains that let your team do more without growing headcount. Risk reduction that prevents expensive failures or compliance problems.
Most product decisions map to at least one of these. If something doesn’t, that’s worth examining.
Where This Goes Wrong
I’m seeing PMs overcorrect and try to manage marketing, sales, or other business functions themselves. Usually this comes from good intentions – business outcomes matter, and it feels like nobody else is moving quickly enough.
This backfires. When you absorb go-to-market execution, you lose time for the judgment calls that are actually your responsibility. Your job is to make your product’s business case clear enough that other functions can execute independently. Don’t try to be a unicorn, be a consummate collaborator. I understand numbers but when I want expert opinion and judgement I’ll go to an expert.
How Cross-Functional Work Actually Functions
The relationship between product, sales, and finance works when there’s clarity about ownership. Product defines the value proposition and provides evidence. Sales translates that into customer conversations. Finance measures impact and validates the business case.
You can make a start by creating what I call “sellability material” – not marketing collateral, but clear documentation of what problem the product is solving, for whom, and what outcomes you could demonstrate. Sales can take that and work with customers without needing product in every conversation.
Action
Pick an initiative from your roadmap this week. Write two paragraphs about the business case without mentioning the product. Just the business problem, the cost of not solving it, and the measurable outcome you expect. Share it with someone in finance or operations and ask if it makes sense.
If they need clarifying questions about what the product actually does, you’re still thinking product-first. The product is how you solve the problem, not the problem itself.
This felt uncomfortable when I started doing it. I came up through engineering and design, and I thought the business framing was someone else’s job. But the PMs who have influence in strategic decisions are the ones who can frame their work in business terms. The ones who can’t end up being told what to build.
That’s the difference now.