Financial skills every PM needs: Elena Luneva at INDUSTRY 2025
“You’re speaking in customer; your stakeholders are listening in finance.”
This is what CPO and advisor Elena Luneva calls the gap between being right and being effective and it’s one of the biggest challenges for PMs. In her keynote talk at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, she explains how and why product people should learn to speak finance.
Get on the same page
Drawing on her time as a general manager at Nextdoor, Elena starts with an anecdote about the feature that almost died—the now-beloved Maps—and what had to change in order to save it.
As a GM of Local Business, Elena’s responsibility was to help users discover new stops along their daily route and connect with people in their communities. Based on data and user research, maps were the best way to do that: they were three times more engaging than a traditional feed and users wanted geographical discoverability.
But her proposals about "improving neighborhood discovery" and "reducing friction in local connection" fell on deaf ears. Execs would nod politely without understanding what this had to do with driving revenue and improving user retention. So, what was missing?
She needed to reframe Maps in financial terms, like this:
- Maps is an ad platform.
- It has potential for recurring partnerships revenue.
- It can bring in 3x the ad revenue growth.
- Maps offers new differentiators for enterprise sales conversions.
To get on the same page, Elena described Maps in financial terms: as a revenue platform and an opportunity for recurring ad partnerships. Having advertisers bid organically to appear on neighbourhood maps (like Reese’s appearing on the seasonal Halloween map) could bring in three times the ads revenue and give Nextdoor a leg up through features their competitors didn’t have. Once that clicked, Maps finally started gaining traction.
Speaking finance
This works because PMs tend to speak in terms of customer experience (user research, engagement, better features), which, to the executives listening, is like Klingon. Meanwhile, they understand and operate in the universal language of finance.
To illustrate this point, she asks the audience to put up their hands if they know the following metrics, off the top of their head:
- Their product’s unit economics
- Their customer acquisition cost
- Their customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio
After a total of four hands raised during this exercise, Elena concluded: “No wonder nobody takes us seriously. I hope everybody’s vibe coding.”
Jokes aside, she went on to explain that when executives make business decisions they’re essentially making strategic bets with these four questions in mind:
- What is it?
- Why does it matter?
- When do I get it?
- How much will it cost me?
So, below are two ways to answer with numbers.
Revenue modeling
This means seeing features as funnels where customers convert to paid, engage, and generate revenue. Elena illustrates this by using search as an example. The search feature is often responsible for a sizeable share of revenue, but improvements can be hard to justify.
Instead of saying you want to make search easier to use, she recommends leading with the numbers: “By improving click through rate by .5% we increase revenues from $500,000 to $1.5 million.”
Another thing to consider is the feature to financial impact pipeline. In Elena’s example, introducing Maps had the effect of compounding revenue streams: seasonal maps increased user engagement and allowed for partner integrations, which translated to increased time on platform and, ultimately, more revenue.
Business case modeling
Elena explains horizon planning—categorising product bets into those that pay off in six months (Horizon 1), within a year (Horizon 2), and those with potential for big, long-term impact (Horizon 3)—as another way to talk numbers.
For the mapping interface on Nextdoor, the horizons looks liked this:
Horizon 1
As the feature was brand-new, the team was first concerned with feasibility.
- Can it be done?
- Will people engage?
- Will sponsors engage?
The metrics they measured were intended to test whether this could pan out. So, they looked at:
- Time on platform
- Engagement
- Sponsorship revenue
Armed with the proof points from the first horizon, the goal of Horizon 2 was to turn it into a system that worked reliably.
Horizon 2
Maps added new differentiating features intended to boost revenue and user engagement, like:
- Seasonal campaigns
- Business integration
- Events integration
And the metrics they tracked adapted, too:
- Platform effects
- Positivity & sentiment
- Spinsorship revenue
- Recurring revenue
Eventually, this growth leads to the ability to invest in long-term features and changes.
Horizon 3
In the long run, it was time to make Maps an integral part of how users engaged with the app.
- Maps as core discovery infrastructure
So, they looked for the metrics that would track its success:
- Numbers central to user experience
- Ad revenue from maps additive to platform revenue
Closing with a challenge
Elena ended her talk with an invitation: adopting the language of finance into everyday product conversations. Instead of DAU/MAU, using Revenue potential (or ARPDAU); instead of Retention, use Lifetime Value (LTV); instead of Engagement, Revenue per user (ARPU); instead of Support tickets, Operating expenses (OpEx).
Instead of talking about user experience, PMs should focus on revenue impact. Move from asking for resources to proposing an investment. Finally, it’s easier to defend your roadmap to your stakeholders when you frame it as presenting your business case.
This way, you can bridge the language gap with executives and fight for their products in the most effective way possible.
About the author
Alexandra Ciufudean
Alexandra is the newsletter editor at Mind the Product and a journalist with six years' experience covering tech, culture, and the online space. She's worked with New_Public and Untested and co-founded GRV Media's graduate writers' program.
