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The Language of Business

Bit of a clickbaity title, but there’s some good advice for product managers in this article about making sure the organization understands that product is a profit center, not a cost center. This is the most important point:

Directly tie product to revenue. One way to do this is revenue attribution. In most companies, revenue and revenue growth is tied to marketing or sales. Making the point that product provided the thing to sell and the features that draw in customers is difficult to make. Product, in this regard, looks passive, and marketing or sales are actively doing something. It is easier to attribute recurring revenue to product because it prevents churn and increases upsells and add-on products.

This can be harder to do with some products—like a platform product with lots of internal customers. But the work is important. As Mike Fisher points out in Language of Business:

The lingua franca of business is finance. Each discipline speaks its native language, be that engineering, marketing, product, etc. but when they get together the common language that everyone should understand is finance.

And what that means for PMs:

The core message I want to convey is that understanding the language of finance is not just about adding another skill to your repertoire, although that is worthwhile; it’s about bridging the gap between technical expertise and business acumen. It’s about translating the complex, technical projects we work on into narratives that resonate with stakeholders across the board, narratives that clearly articulate value, risk, and return. This skill set enables technologists, engineers, and product managers to not only defend their projects and ideas but also to align them more closely with the strategic goals of the business.