18. Why modern Product managers must think like Business Owners
The modern PM needs to be both.
A few years ago, a PM I worked with vented their frustration over a drink:
"I hate that they're making us focus on sales. If you look at PMs at FAANG companies like Google, they focus on the technology and delivery, actual product work. The business stuff is someone else’s job, as it should be.”
At the time, I nodded along. Their weekly meetings were dominated by revenue reviews led by leaders who used to be in Sales. The product vision was hardly ever mentioned, innovation seemed to be stifled, and it felt like a circus 🎪…and not in a good way.
But something about that complaint stuck with me, and over time I kept coming back to it in my head.
Where Product Ends and Business Begins
The line between Product and Business has always been blurry. It doesn’t help that the line varies deeply between firms, and even within different departments or business lines within the same company. In many companies, it is still seen as separate and often defined as:
Business manager: focuses on the financial performance, the “where we’ll play to win” strategy, revenue goals and operations
Product manager: owns the product vision, focus on the custom problems, feature design, testing, user experience, delivery and roadmap management
Over time, I’m coming to the realisation that the separation no longer works. At least not if you want to be an impactful PM.
Why Business Thinking matters now more than ever
PMs today are expected to shift from outputs to outcomes. It’s no longer enough to launch a feature—we need to show how it moved the needle.
That means understanding business context and connecting our work to measurable business impact:
Without a business, there’s no product. And without product-market fit, there’s no business.
For us to build products that matter, it's key for us to understand and be able to verbalise the impact on our business and our customers.
What does “Business-aware” Product work look like?
Here are actionable ways for PMs to integrate business thinking into their day to day:
Understand the metrics that matter 🔍
Firstly, we need to be speaking the right language for business and understand the metrics that we care about. This depends on your business and examples could include:
Conversion rates and drop offs
Customer acquisition costs
Customer churn and retention rates
Customer/account/user growth and rates of growth
Implementation and onboarding periods
As PMs, we should be aiming - and able - to answer:
“What business outcome am I trying to drive by designing and shipping a particular feature? How will we measure if it worked or not?”
Use your product data to tell a story📊
Make it a priority to instrument your product to collect meaningful usage data and use it to influence prioritisation, justify trade-offs and share your product vision.
For example, we were aware that a sense of risk for accidental downloads was making users reluctant to use our products. By creating additional controls and safeguarding measures, we could measure the number of users who decided to opt in to the new product features and link it to a reduction in credits being issued, as well as an increase in usage among existing customers - being careful not to tie correlation to causation.
Speak the language of the business 💼
When talking to internal partners or management, frame discussions around business impact, not just product delivery.
Instead of:
“We shipped a new internal user flag for customer support to improve customer experience.”
Try:
“The new user flag contributed to a reduction of accident related credits by 5%, which could improve our monthly revenue by an estimated $100k by the end of the year.”
Being able to articulate the connection our work and the impact can be very challenging, especially when you look after an internal product, or your product is a small cog in a much much bigger machine. How does the PM who looks after one Bloomberg function define their impact, among a universe of over 30,000 functions? And yet, we must find a way if we are to speak and be heard.
PMs, like their products, must continue to evolve 🦖
The advent of AI is changing the PM game. A lot of traditional PM work, such as creating mock ups, writing user stories, and managing project timelines are increasingly able to be automated.
There’s a reason that companies like AirBnB are “retiring” the PM role.
That means that the PMs who will stand out from the crowd and remain irreplaceable are those who recognise that they are responsible for driving business growth and product growth - a contribution that they can measure. PMs who can connect their product work to revenue, retention, and wider business goals will become the ones who are indispensable parts of the business.
My Own Shift in Mindset
Looking back, I wondered if business strategy as someone else’s responsibility. But through experience—and some humbling lessons—I’ve come to believe:
Great PMs treat product strategy as a reflection of business strategy.
We serve our users best when we understand the environment our product lives in—how it makes money, where it loses users, and what levers we can pull to create real growth.
I consider myself very fortunate to be responsible for a product with direct customers and revenue responsibility. Owning the business impact comes with its own set of challenges - how do we continue to drive growth, especially when times are tough? What do we need to build to support that growth?
To be a PM that stands out in this evolving landscape, we need to be able to build the narrative, drive growth and make our impact known. Good luck!