How to connect product features to company goals - Elena Luneva (Maven, Nextdoor, Braintrust)
Why do great product ideas fail to gain traction? According to Elena Luna, it’s rarely about the strategy and more often about the storytelling. In this episode of The Product Experience, Elena Luneva, a seasoned CPO, GM, and Maven instructor, joins Randy Silver live from INDUSTRY 2025 to explore how product leaders can better communicate the why behind their product decisions.
Watch our conversation on YouTube here.
We’re taking Community Questions for The Product Experience podcast. Got a burning product question for Lily, Randy, or an upcoming guest? Submit it here.
What we learned from Elena
- Speaking 'User' isn’t enough – Executives care about business impact, not just engagement metrics.
- Translate features to financials – Frame product initiatives in terms of ARPU, opex savings, or revenue impact.
- Use storytelling with data – Combine real user insights with projections to make your case.
- Seasonality matters – Product testing should account for time-of-year and market behaviour.
- Align go-to-market early – Synchronising product and sales is key to driving measurable outcomes.
- Ask better questions – Start with: What is it? Why does it matter? How much will it cost? When will we get it?
Chapters
- 2:45 – The Ceiling for Great PMs
- 4:09 – Speaking Executive
- 5:22 – Case Study: Nextdoor Maps
- 9:52 – Translating Engagement to Revenue
- 10:49 – Embedding Finance into Product Thinking
- 12:43 – Pivoting During COVID
- 14:36 – Business Fluency at All Levels
- 16:00 – Building Context Across Teams
- 18:26 – The Four Questions
- 20:06 – Thinking in Horizons
- 22:43 – Shifting Accountability
- 26:23 – CPMO vs. CPTO
- 27:43 – Common Mistakes
- 29:42 – Seasonality & Cannibalisation
- 32:29 – Practical First Steps
- 34:21 – Credits & Outro
Featured Links
Episode Transcript
0:00 — Elena Luneva
They can't communicate to then their executives, their stakeholders the why. Why are they building this road map? Why
0:06 — Elena Luneva
are they building this feature? And so great ideas just uh never get built.
0:12 — Randy Silver
Why is it that we can do everything by the book and still not be able to work well with other parts of the business,
0:17 — Randy Silver
whether it's connecting metrics to money, translating product to profit, or missing key things like seasonality.
0:23 — Elena Luneva
We're just speaking a different language. We're speaking user. executives are trying to really work on
0:29 — Elena Luneva
the business. How do you move the business forward? What are the bets that the business needs to make to move it
0:35 — Randy Silver
forward? Hey, it's the product experience and I'm Randy Silver. Elena Luna has the answer
0:41 — Randy Silver
and it's not what you do, but how you talk about it. She's seen the mistakes we keep making and as a CPO and Maven
0:48 — Randy Silver
partner, she's got practical advice on how to get past them. The pieces were there, but they weren't packaged or they
0:54 — Randy Silver
weren't translated in a way that executives would pay attention to.
1:00 — Randy Silver
Elena, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to have you here in Cleveland. Have you How are you enjoying the conference?
1:05 — Elena Luneva
Oh, Randy, um, thank you for welcoming me. I'm really enjoying industry and just meeting all the product folks from
1:11 — Randy Silver
uh around the globe. So, you did a fantastic talk on the stage earlier and we really enjoyed it.
1:17 — Randy Silver
We wanted to dig a little bit deeper into it, but for anyone who's not lucky enough to be here in Cleveland and
1:22 — Randy Silver
didn't see you or doesn't know you already, just give us a little bit of introduction. What are you doing these days? And how did you get into product
1:29 — Elena Luneva
in the first place? Ah, it's a it's a long story. So, I've been in product for uh over 20 years. I
1:35 — Elena Luneva
started my career as a product manager at BlackRock, now the largest asset management company. And I've worked with
1:43 — Elena Luneva
uh different companies uh open uh Open Table, Next Door, Liquid Space, Nuna, um
1:49 — Elena Luneva
the last 10 years in uh executive positions, so VP, GM, CPO.
1:55 — Randy Silver
Mh. Uh and most recently, I've been working on AI software. So whether that's um
2:01 — Elena Luneva
interviewing with an AI avatar or doing the matching between candidates and
2:06 — Elena Luneva
recruiters and now I'm trying to expand that to working with different companies
2:12 — Elena Luneva
primarily AI so that we can get the product foundation in place make sure that they have the right teams so that
2:19 — Elena Luneva
um they can execute on that strategy. AI companies are moving super fast. So they
2:25 — Elena Luneva
need to uh constantly figure out which functions to keep, which ones to AI can do. So I'm working with a couple right
2:32 — Elena Luneva
now to do that. And then I'm also working with uh product managers who are looking to accelerate their careers, get
2:40 — Elena Luneva
into that executive suite. I teach a course called uh develop CPO level
2:45 — Elena Luneva
skills where we cover go to market strategy, financial acumen. some of the
2:51 — Elena Luneva
things we'll talk through today in addition to executive presence and influence like how do you communicate um
2:56 — Elena Luneva
those strategies those products that you're building so that they get invested in and that you can move them
3:02 — Randy Silver
forward. Fantastic. Yeah, it's these these soft skills these product adjacent skills that can be the hardest things to do
3:08 — Randy Silver
because we spend all our time focusing on internal how do we do our bit but
3:14 — Elena Luneva
then how do we align and work with everybody else's gets overlooked way too often. It does. And especially um as an
3:21 — Elena Luneva
operator, a really great product manager, you're so good at the user, the
3:27 — Elena Luneva
user needs, translating that to de uh developers, to designers, really building great products.
3:33 — Elena Luneva
And what I've noticed with my team, with people I coach is they have that ceiling
3:39 — Elena Luneva
where they can't communicate to then their executives, their stakeholders the why. Why are they building this road
3:46 — Elena Luneva
map? Why are they building this feature? And so great ideas just uh never get
3:51 — Randy Silver
built. So so let's let's go dig into why why is this so hard? I mean it's obvious,
3:57 — Randy Silver
right? We've done the business model canvas. We've done this and that. We've done all ticked all the boxes that say
4:03 — Randy Silver
this is the right thing to do. We've gone through prioritization. Why is it not intuitively obvious to
4:09 — Elena Luneva
everyone else that that this is the thing to do? Absolutely. Um I think we're just
4:14 — Elena Luneva
speaking a different language. We're speaking user. we're speaking uh you know Randy has a specific problem and
4:20 — Elena Luneva
I'm trying to solve that problem for Randy but then executives are trying to really work on the business how do you
4:28 — Elena Luneva
move the business forward what are the bets that the business needs to make to move it forward and so they're just
4:34 — Elena Luneva
thinking about things in a different way the second piece is you're usually
4:39 — Elena Luneva
working on a piece of the business um for example you're making the conversion funnel better or you're making
4:46 — Elena Luneva
engagement better. Um, but that's a piece of how the business runs and so
4:51 — Elena Luneva
you're talking in a language that frequently isn't understood. The second piece I would say is is the numbers
4:57 — Elena Luneva
piece and we'll talk about that today is that translation of how do you translate
5:03 — Elena Luneva
user value that Ry's going to find the plumber for his uh house faster to well
5:10 — Elena Luneva
now because we're a business that makes money from the plumber bookings. This is
5:16 — Elena Luneva
how it ladders back to the business and how the functionality that we put out there will move the business forward.
5:22 — Randy Silver
Let's bring this one to life. You've in your talk yesterday, you did a really good case study. You talked about uh a
5:28 — Randy Silver
feature that seems like it's incredibly obvious. It was definitely the right thing to do, but it was something you're
5:33 — Randy Silver
doing at Next Door, and it was hard to get over the line and hard to convince people to invest in it.
5:38 — Randy Silver
Let's let's go through story. It's maps. Maps in in a local app, local, you know,
5:44 — Randy Silver
a local neighborhood based app seems like table stakes,
5:49 — Elena Luneva
right? That's what it felt. That's what it felt like to me. Um, I was the general
5:54 — Elena Luneva
manager at Next Door. So, my responsibility was how do I get local businesses onto Next Door? And the
6:01 — Elena Luneva
other, I don't know, educational part of this is when somebody's using your app in a way that you didn't uh build it
6:08 — Elena Luneva
for. So, when I joined, local businesses were trying to connect with neighbors. Mh. They were trying to post about their
6:15 — Elena Luneva
bakery, but that was taken down because it felt like it was against moderation guidelines that they were
6:21 — Elena Luneva
self-promoting, but there were thousands of them trying to do this. Uh, so an aha moment was,
6:28 — Elena Luneva
hey, if somebody's trying to abuse your product and you can find a way for them to complement um the connections that
6:36 — Elena Luneva
are happening, there's probably something in that for for your business. And that's what we did. Uh we added um
6:43 — Elena Luneva
hundreds of thousands of the plumbers, the roofers, the bakeries into Next Door. And one of the pieces of feedback
6:51 — Elena Luneva
I got from them is, "Hey, neighbors tend to follow a specific
6:57 — Elena Luneva
path." Like, I don't know, you have kids, I have kids. You take them to school, you go to work, and then you
7:04 — Elena Luneva
have your specific route. Maybe you pick up a coffee on the way. but you never learn that there's another bakery that
7:09 — Elena Luneva
you probably potentially like better a block away. It's not a part of your discovery path.
7:15 — Elena Luneva
So, that was one aha moment for me and it was something that I'd try to let other executives know and they're like,
7:20 — Elena Luneva
"Oh, that's that's interesting." And I'd get kind of that that head nod. The other pieces which you said the the
7:27 — Elena Luneva
obvious of it's a it's a local local app and yet we were using a feed. I it made
7:34 — Elena Luneva
sense at the time. Facebook was using a feed, Snapchat was using a feed. So, it was the way that social networks were
7:40 — Elena Luneva
built. But what we also saw is there would sometimes be negativity or people would
7:45 — Elena Luneva
be scrolling through and it would wouldn't get you to that connection. So I was like, hey,
7:51 — Elena Luneva
you know, let let me do some experiments and see if when we put a map inside the application, like will people engage
7:58 — Elena Luneva
better and and we did find that we found 3x engagement uh with people leveraging
8:04 — Elena Luneva
maps. That seems like a really easy metric to understand, right? Um so I you know I brought that
8:10 — Elena Luneva
up. So I was trying to do the the product management way of users like it, users engage, this is good for us, this
8:17 — Randy Silver
is good for our brand, this is good for our community and and people were interested, people were listening but not enough to make it
8:24 — Elena Luneva
a priority. Mhm. So yeah, I felt like I kept being like, why is nobody hearing me? And kept going
8:31 — Elena Luneva
through those motions until um and and frankly seeing other product managers around me also with ideas I thought were
8:37 — Elena Luneva
good doing the same. And then I started talking to the partnerships team and
8:44 — Elena Luneva
showing some of these prototypes and they're like, "Well, if you're thinking about like a seasonal map, like a um a
8:51 — Elena Luneva
map where, you know, trick-or-treaters in the neighborhood could go find houses that were giving out treats. So, it
8:58 — Elena Luneva
would make it easy for parents to do. I think there's a there there, but if we get um one of our brands like Recess to
9:04 — Elena Luneva
sponsor it or can you mock up a way that we can do that?" And so we did with a
9:10 — Elena Luneva
designer and they're like, "Well, we can get recess to pay like millions of dollars for this." All right, that
9:17 — Elena Luneva
they're there. And then I talked to our uh head of revenue and um converted the engagement
9:25 — Elena Luneva
numbers to, hey, if these people stay and they engage more, then there's a knock-on effects on our advertising
9:31 — Elena Luneva
revenue and this is how it translates. And immediately there was a okay, go talk to this person. let's see how we
9:37 — Elena Luneva
can prioritize it for this next quarter. And then I was like, well, I'm saying the same thing. It's just I'm now adding
9:45 — Elena Luneva
those financial metrics and I'm getting layers of revenue that this could generate for the company and now people
9:52 — Randy Silver
are listening. So, you're speaking their language specifically. Exactly.
9:57 — Randy Silver
Yeah. It's interesting. you know, the the 3x engagement that's in for us, you
10:03 — Randy Silver
know, what you did to put a map on is the output. The 3x engagement is the outcome for them. That's the output
10:12 — Randy Silver
and they're looking for the outcome or or to say output to outcome to impact and the impact is on the on the revenue,
10:19 — Randy Silver
but you just hadn't spelled that out initially. Exactly. Okay. So, it was a the the pieces were there, but they weren't
10:24 — Randy Silver
packaged or they weren't translated in a way that um executives would pay attention to. So, what did that lead to? So, this this
10:32 — Randy Silver
was a oneoff uh product, a feature development, right? You rolled it out, it was successful, you made a bunch of
10:38 — Randy Silver
money and people were very happy. The next time you had an idea, did you approach it the same way or did you did
10:44 — Elena Luneva
you start with thinking about the impact and discussing it with your the peers around the company?
10:49 — Elena Luneva
Yeah. So, with that, I was like, well, all right. So there's a difference and um there's a need to translate there's a
10:55 — Elena Luneva
need to speak effectively executive um and I teach that now in my course um one
11:00 — Elena Luneva
part is executive presence the other piece is the finance piece so anytime I'd have my team or myself think through
11:08 — Elena Luneva
what is that next piece that we do I'd start with um what is this feature how
11:14 — Elena Luneva
does it fit into our product strategy but then also translate to what are the revenue impacts and then combine that
11:20 — Elena Luneva
with things like scenario planning. It's like, okay, in if nothing if the best
11:25 — Elena Luneva
case scenario happens, this is probably the projections, but then if something different happens,
11:31 — Elena Luneva
then here here's the the downside of our scenarios. And that that helped me a lot
11:38 — Elena Luneva
um again at Next Door when Corona virus hit. And so as the general manager, we
11:43 — Elena Luneva
had um a revenue projection for the local business line based on uh the portfolio of uh product work that we
11:50 — Elena Luneva
would do. And then 50% of local businesses shut down. And so we had to throw that plan
11:58 — Elena Luneva
out the window and really start with that bottom scenario of okay, if a bunch of them shut down, how do we now pivot
12:05 — Elena Luneva
our product strategy and how do we think about the go to market and the products
12:10 — Elena Luneva
that we have um as a portfolio to figure out where do we go from from here? And
12:17 — Elena Luneva
so we went from a product that was extractive that really got people to
12:22 — Elena Luneva
resubscribe into subscription type models within the product to how do we get money into local business pockets
12:30 — Elena Luneva
right away. And so we moved the whole product strategy to gift cards to delivery to a way to to move revenue to
12:38 — Elena Luneva
them right away. And so the way that we also went to market, uh, we had to move
12:43 — Elena Luneva
from, you know, boots on the ground, uh, sales team to really telling those
12:49 — Elena Luneva
positive stories. And so the whole system and how that um, both our
12:55 — Elena Luneva
projections, the product suite, how we positioned it in the market and our business model had to change. So as a
13:02 — Elena Luneva
general manager, I had to go to the board and explain that like, hey, I gave you this number before we're going to
13:10 — Elena Luneva
circumstances have changed. You may have noticed that away. Exactly. We're in a completely different scenario right now.
13:16 — Elena Luneva
We don't know what will happen in the market. You know, we were following China. Here's some of the businesses
13:22 — Elena Luneva
that came back. It's the ones outside of the home like your gardeners. And here's what we propose to do from a
13:29 — Elena Luneva
product perspective. we're going to go to a package that gets them money now and here's how our business model
13:35 — Elena Luneva
changes. We'll go from subscriptions to percentages and percentages of partner
13:40 — Elena Luneva
revenue and this is how our go to market changes. So then it helps a product leader really think beyond not only what
13:48 — Elena Luneva
is the best case and what are what are we solving for our users which was still very necessary. we needed to help our
13:54 — Elena Luneva
local businesses, but then it helps you paint that picture and get your executive team, your board aligned with
14:01 — Randy Silver
your new direction as well. So, you just talk about this is something you were doing at the general
14:06 — Randy Silver
manager level. It's something that is should probably be expected for most
14:11 — Randy Silver
product leaders at a certain point, but how what's the level of fluency that's needed if you're
14:17 — Randy Silver
more junior? Do you you're still talking your span of control is a lot more
14:23 — Randy Silver
limited. You might be thinking about this stuff but you might not have access to all the information.
14:29 — Randy Silver
What's the right level of fluency or or uh uh competency that you needed say a
14:36 — Elena Luneva
mid-career or junior level? Yeah. So I I that's a really good question. And I think as you start out
14:41 — Elena Luneva
in your product career, the the product foundation of being user centric, curious, datadriven, um work really
14:49 — Elena Luneva
great with design, with engineering, with AI these days are the foundational
14:54 — Elena Luneva
one. I do chalk up the the data driven piece. There is the what are the metrics
14:59 — Elena Luneva
for my product? What what do I see after I launch my product? There needs to be an understanding of what is the business
15:06 — Elena Luneva
model for the business I'm operating in. Mhm. So, Next Door, as an example, was an ads driven business. So, that means if you
15:13 — Elena Luneva
do something to the feed that gets people to stay, you usually
15:19 — Elena Luneva
impact ads revenue in a positive way. So, as a um mid-career product manager,
15:25 — Elena Luneva
just understanding those effects I think is is foundational and something that
15:30 — Elena Luneva
you uh should know. And as you progress through your career that that like systems thinking of if I change this
15:37 — Elena Luneva
part of the funnel, this is how it impacts the rest of the stack and um
15:42 — Randy Silver
kind of the knock-on effects uh around other parts of the platform. How do you help your team of product
15:49 — Randy Silver
people and then the people they're working with the designers, the devs, the everybody else to really understand
15:55 — Randy Silver
this and internalize it? It's because you like it's it's it's different language. It's not something they have a direct span of control or impact on on a
16:02 — Randy Silver
day-to-day basis. Yeah. Do you use maps and like you know you I would do like a a service design map to
16:09 — Elena Luneva
show how a business actually works from from a customer interaction point of view. Would you do that to say this is
16:15 — Elena Luneva
how the money flows? That is one of the tools. Um we
16:21 — Elena Luneva
frequently use user journeys which are very um prevalent. It's something that people understand. But what I like to do
16:27 — Elena Luneva
as a leader is provide that business context and really make sure that the R&D teams know the why behind why we're
16:35 — Elena Luneva
doing this and know the financial aspects of the why. So, uh they know the
16:40 — Elena Luneva
the end to-end journeys like how does a business work through next door but then also what does that mean for the
16:47 — Elena Luneva
company? What are the KPIs for the company that we're trying to move with the changes that we're making? So then
16:53 — Elena Luneva
uh when people are making decisions around what to build, how to build it, how to connect those things to other
16:59 — Elena Luneva
parts of the product, they have that context. And I think that what that really helps with is instead of going
17:07 — Elena Luneva
from like shipping the org where you know I'm responsible for this window, I'm responsible for that other window.
17:13 — Elena Luneva
I'd like to align teams more in a GM structure where you have um your
17:18 — Elena Luneva
marketing sales team working with your product team on a specific outcome
17:24 — Elena Luneva
and that gives the product team that context that that metric that's out
17:29 — Elena Luneva
outfacing and they're responsible for the how. It might be a feature, it might be an
17:35 — Randy Silver
optimization, it might be a bet on a new technology and there's two sides of it. We were talking about revenue, but there's also
17:42 — Randy Silver
costs. Yes. That come in and it's a lot of companies can be ky about this. You don't
17:47 — Randy Silver
especially you were talking about AI and things you cost of compute, cost of tokens can be high, cost of third party
17:53 — Randy Silver
vendor services can be quite high, but you feel like you need them to to do some of this development a lot of the
17:58 — Randy Silver
time. Yeah. How what level of expectation do you have for people? So at GM level it's one
18:06 — Randy Silver
thing but what level of expectation do you have for people in the team to really start to understand and manage the cost you know we've at least in
18:13 — Randy Silver
Europe we've been fighting the battle to be closer to P&L and have that but it's kind of jealously guarded
18:20 — Elena Luneva
in other parts of the business sometimes. No absolutely. Um so my expectation for the team is to answer four questions and
18:26 — Elena Luneva
these are basic but frequently people have a hard time answering. So what is
18:32 — Elena Luneva
it? Why does it matter? How much is it going to cost me? And when do I get it?
18:39 — Elena Luneva
And that helps people to be to be like, oh well, but none of those a great idea. The why does it matter is how much money
18:45 — Elena Luneva
am I going to make is from this part of it. Yeah. And then the the how much does it cost me gets into like do I need to hire
18:52 — Elena Luneva
someone? Is there um uh cloud is there huge cost behind this?
18:58 — Elena Luneva
Um how much is it going to take me? also uh gets us into the conversation of you
19:03 — Elena Luneva
know with AI enablement perhaps we can get there faster with a headcount it'll take us 3 months to hire someone and
19:10 — Elena Luneva
plus another three months to get there and then the why does it matter um there is the financial component but then it's
19:17 — Elena Luneva
also gets the team to think systematically like if I add this what is the knock-on effect to let's say
19:24 — Elena Luneva
engagement in another part what is the knock-on effect can we take out a different feature or does it hang
19:30 — Elena Luneva
together with the rest of the system? And so that helps the team ask those
19:35 — Elena Luneva
types of questions internally and then uh us as a team think through what is
19:41 — Elena Luneva
our portfolio of investments and what are those outcomes ladder up to.
19:46 — Randy Silver
So there's the the basic level of doing this of saying it costs this much, it'll make this much therefore we can
19:53 — Randy Silver
prioritize and you can do some rice or ice scoring or something like that. There's next levels to this stuff
19:58 — Randy Silver
because then you get cost delay. What is the the impact of us not doing this? You know, opportunity cost. Uh and then you
20:06 — Randy Silver
can play around with. Well, it's it's kind of revenue neutral but changes capex versus opex or it does things in
20:12 — Randy Silver
iittita and and all these things like that that are I mean we have lots of weird acronyms and and thought patterns in product
20:19 — Randy Silver
world and in dev world, but finance is it's a whole different game of doing it. So, you know, how do
20:26 — Randy Silver
you understand which game it is that you're playing or what are the things that you uh that the finance team or
20:32 — Randy Silver
that the management team are going to care about and what your potential levers or opportunities are?
20:37 — Elena Luneva
Yeah. So we I try to keep it pretty um like paper napkin level at the at the decision level of because at that point
20:45 — Elena Luneva
you depending on how far a horizon of an outcome is you know everything is 10x
20:51 — Elena Luneva
everything takes six months everything takes a year and we uh joked about this yesterday. The exercise really is to get
20:58 — Elena Luneva
people to think and to have those questions answered so that when we're making tradeoffs, when we're having the
21:03 — Elena Luneva
conversations, we've done enough research around um both the opportunity cost, the trade-off costs and how what
21:12 — Elena Luneva
are the bets we're making as a company. And so the way I like to think about things farther in the future is much
21:18 — Elena Luneva
more in horizons like something like AI, everyone's talking
21:23 — Elena Luneva
about it. If we do this for the right reasons, where's that what TAM is that going to open up for the company? What
21:30 — Elena Luneva
is it going to open up for us that we can't do w with what we're doing right now? And then this other pieces are
21:36 — Elena Luneva
things like congruency. If we do that, do we have the go to market strategy for it? Is it like a share of wallet
21:42 — Elena Luneva
expansion? So really thinking about um that that system for the company and
21:47 — Elena Luneva
then when I bring it down to my team and the individuals working through each of the components,
21:53 — Elena Luneva
we have those types of conversations so that we can make the the trade-off decisions and ask the questions. But
22:00 — Elena Luneva
yeah, to your point, the fidelity doesn't need to be very well thought through. It's a combination of here's
22:06 — Elena Luneva
the outcomes I'm driving. Here's the resources I need. This is how it fits into the system. this is potentially how
22:12 — Elena Luneva
it'll change where we're going. And here's some more questions around just scenarios and what if all of the things
22:20 — Elena Luneva
I'm looking to do are going to take longer or won't give us the outcomes that we
22:25 — Elena Luneva
need and then we can have those types of debates at that level. I like that word
22:30 — Randy Silver
debates because I think one of the key things I'm taking from this is some people think they might have to walk
22:36 — Randy Silver
into that room with the CFO and and whoever else with the answer. And it's really not about that. It's about here's
22:43 — Randy Silver
an interesting thing that we're thinking of. We're presenting it in a way that we'd like to start the discussion and giving you the information
22:49 — Randy Silver
and then you can feedback and we'll we'll we'll we can adjust based on
22:55 — Randy Silver
based on you know if you say oo what actually what we need is this one of the traps I've seen a lot of people uh uh
23:01 — Randy Silver
fail at is you know they start off at as a company especially in the free money era was well we'll get big fast and
23:07 — Randy Silver
we'll figure out revenue later and they don't know how to adjust when all of a sudden the company's like no actually we
23:12 — Randy Silver
need revenue now and they don't know how to to use those levers at all.
23:18 — Elena Luneva
Exactly. And so that's that's the that's the question. You're having a discussion. You're trying to get more
23:24 — Elena Luneva
information than you had before so you can make an educated guess in that point of time. And then when you're delivering
23:31 — Elena Luneva
the work, how do you break it down in a way that you can get smarter a month later, you can get even smarter two
23:36 — Elena Luneva
months later and adjust what you're doing. Okay. There's one really scary part of this which is we've well there's lots of
23:42 — Randy Silver
scary parts but one thing that come you know we are already tentative about putting dates on road maps
23:48 — Randy Silver
now we're walking in with revenue targets as well and there's a limited amount of
23:54 — Randy Silver
influence uh that we have you know we can deliver everything right uh and do what we do follow the plan and
24:01 — Randy Silver
execute what we said but the world may change or sales may have a bad quarter for some
24:08 — Randy Silver
reason or a competitor does something else. So now it's not only did we ship it when
24:13 — Randy Silver
we said we were going to, it's did we realize the the promise of this. How accurate, how confident do we need to be
24:21 — Randy Silver
without being hung out to dry, I guess. Yeah. Um that's that's a big question
24:27 — Elena Luneva
and one where I think the the direction product management is going is really in
24:33 — Elena Luneva
two directions. one you see um that CPTO role emerge. So really R&D getting
24:39 — Elena Luneva
together the CEO wanting one person to talk to for all delivery.
24:45 — Elena Luneva
The other direction I see product uh going is more in the CPMO role. So how do you get R&D and go to market more
24:52 — Elena Luneva
closer together so that we start getting uh held accountable to outcomes rather than hey
24:59 — Elena Luneva
we we shipped everything perfectly on the timeline we said and clearly the go
25:04 — Elena Luneva
to market function is the is the one that messed up and so when I work with
25:10 — Elena Luneva
teams um I try to for every initiative really align the go to market and the
25:16 — Elena Luneva
product um the product things that we can to the outcomes because that's the
25:21 — Elena Luneva
missing piece for for outcomes. If we're saying we're going to generate this much revenue, you're absolutely right. The
25:28 — Elena Luneva
product needs to ship, marketing needs to do all the right things, sales needs to do all the right things. And if one
25:33 — Elena Luneva
of those is not aligned, it doesn't matter that we shipped a great product or it doesn't matter that we sold a
25:39 — Elena Luneva
great product if the product isn't there, right? Um, so in thinking through
25:44 — Elena Luneva
helping teams think through the financial outcomes, the the company outcomes, we then align to a much better
25:51 — Elena Luneva
spot because then bottoms up, we can have those conversations of like, hey, I can ship you this thing six months from
25:57 — Elena Luneva
now. Is the sales team ready to talk about this? Oh, no, they're not because
26:02 — Elena Luneva
they're on this other they're they're selling the core product. Okay, then we need to adjust how we think about this.
26:09 — Elena Luneva
Oh, this is a future bet. We're going to test it out. We're going to have a customer advisory board. We're going to get signal. Got it. That's a very
26:15 — Elena Luneva
different outcome. And then it becomes much more of a team sport. You have a lot more of those answers up front. And
26:23 — Elena Luneva
when you land to that six months from now, it's it's less of a stabbing people in
26:29 — Elena Luneva
the back. It's it's much more of like, yes, this is what we knew and this is where we are today. And of course, it should always be a
26:35 — Randy Silver
collaborative team- based thing, but we know the reality of But then there's reality. Exactly.
26:41 — Randy Silver
Just one side question. Uh you mentioned a CPMO and I haven't come across any of them yet. I'm just curious is that more
26:47 — Randy Silver
about product marketing and not brand marketing or is it encompass both in where you've seen it?
26:52 — Elena Luneva
It encompasses both. I see less of them than CPTTO. I recently wrote an article um the future of product management
26:59 — Elena Luneva
and I um so an example that I had was Lego. uh they had a CPMO that combined
27:04 — Elena Luneva
the practices of how do we create the right products for kids for adults but also how do we take them to market and
27:11 — Elena Luneva
there's more CPG brands that do that now but I do see things like um AI products
27:17 — Elena Luneva
where there is a race to market right now you can build anything right now and that big opportunity is how do you
27:25 — Elena Luneva
position how do you price how do you get to your users and get there quickly and
27:30 — Elena Luneva
so in this era we can build anything yesterday like that positioning that go to market becomes so critical.
27:36 — Randy Silver
That makes sense. Okay, let's go back to the the core subject. Um, one of the things I really enjoyed about your talk
27:43 — Randy Silver
was and and an article that you wrote about this is you have some very practical advice about uh the the uh
27:50 — Randy Silver
common mistakes that people make on this. So, can you run through a couple of those? Yeah, absolutely. So frequently as
27:57 — Elena Luneva
product managers we use DAO daily active users monthly active
28:02 — Elena Luneva
users. So instead talk about like ARPA DAO what is the revenue per user when
28:08 — Elena Luneva
you talk about things like I'm going to focus on the quality initiatives or I'm
28:13 — Elena Luneva
going to reduce the number of tickets that um customer success is going to need to make. So this is like internal
28:20 — Elena Luneva
product teams instead talk about opex talk about this the cost savings that you're making for the company. I talked
28:27 — Elena Luneva
to someone last night who was in um a nonforprofit and the feedback is hey you still need
28:33 — Elena Luneva
to make money and reinvested in the business and so when you're talking about the initiatives and the impact
28:39 — Elena Luneva
still connected to that revenue impact that you're going to make for yourself or the companies that you're working
28:45 — Randy Silver
with. Yeah. Yeah, I worked for uh a supermarket chain for a while and you know it's a very low margin business and
28:52 — Randy Silver
anytime you want investment in anything the question that came back was if you can figure out how many tins of beans
28:59 — Randy Silver
we're going to need to sell to finance this I mean it's it's a bit facitious obviously but that's that was the DNA of
29:05 — Randy Silver
the organization was we need to scrimp and save on every single penny exactly and how are we going to make this work
29:12 — Randy Silver
what's the really you have to justify and connected to the the cans of beans.
29:17 — Elena Luneva
At Open Table, we charged restaurants on a on a monthly basis.
29:23 — Elena Luneva
And so it was disconnected from when people would show up. And so one of the features um we delivered was uh mobile
29:30 — Elena Luneva
payments so that we can connect when we charge restaurants to the time of the transaction to smooth it out and have it
29:36 — Elena Luneva
connected with when they actually get value. Going back to uh the the maps example at
29:42 — Randy Silver
Next Door, what about seasonality? You said you tied this into to Halloween at first. Yeah. Yeah. So, with maps, we had
29:49 — Elena Luneva
several uh seasonal maps like a Halloween map. This another one was around um lights decoration around the
29:56 — Elena Luneva
holiday time. Um and so with that product, with other ones, it's so critical when you're
30:02 — Elena Luneva
testing to understand seasonality. So, an example I have is we launched um deal
30:08 — Elena Luneva
a deals product for local businesses and we test. So this is like, hey, you
30:14 — Elena Luneva
get a free coffee if you buy a coffee type of coupon, but a digital version of
30:20 — Elena Luneva
these. And we tested it in the fall in three markets and one of those markets
30:25 — Elena Luneva
was Chicago and it's cold in Chicago and so that market didn't have the same
30:31 — Elena Luneva
deals adoption. We were, you know, scratching our heads for a second there and then we're like, oh yeah, it's cold.
30:37 — Elena Luneva
It's cold. So yeah, so picking those test markets especially for digital to physical
30:42 — Elena Luneva
products um when you're validating your hypothesis is a really important or even
30:48 — Elena Luneva
thinking through knock-on effects of um if you turn off a uh channel a growth
30:56 — Elena Luneva
channel um that if you don't get that the the top of the funnel filled in a
31:02 — Elena Luneva
specific season before your strong season, you're going to have a much weaker
31:08 — Elena Luneva
uh performance that entire year. Another thing that's come up uh a lot of times is people double counting things
31:15 — Randy Silver
because we we're launching this new thing. It's going to make this but forgetting that it means that people may
31:22 — Elena Luneva
not be using the old thing as much. Yes, we had that same um set of discussions
31:27 — Elena Luneva
with the board because for local businesses, we went from just real estate agents having a specific set of
31:33 — Elena Luneva
products to plumbers and bakeries and roofers having um a portfolio of
31:40 — Elena Luneva
products that they could use. And so the conversations we had was like, well, this could cannibalize our biggest
31:45 — Elena Luneva
revenue source, which are real estate agents. And so we had to model through, you know, subscriptions, deals, the
31:51 — Elena Luneva
packages we put together. and here's the potential cannibalization effect. And by
31:56 — Elena Luneva
the way, if we still added these layers of revenue, it would be significantly larger. So, we walked into those
32:02 — Elena Luneva
conversations knowing that there there would be cannibalization. And we had to have that are we sure about this
32:09 — Elena Luneva
conversation? But we had that data and uh that we could walk our our CRO through and our I think four or five pe
32:16 — Elena Luneva
finance people in the room being very worried about the things that we were about to launch.
32:22 — Randy Silver
Elena, this has been a fantastic chat. I've really enjoyed this. Um, one last question I think we've got time for.
32:29 — Randy Silver
What's one practical thing that I can do or our listeners can do tomorrow to get
32:35 — Randy Silver
started in uh becoming better and more fluent and working better with the finance teams?
32:40 — Elena Luneva
Yeah. Um, I think a first one is at the all hands. The finance team always uh presents the
32:48 — Elena Luneva
financials and you're probably well maybe it was just me scrolling through
32:53 — Elena Luneva
your phone and checking up on all the slacks that you need to make. Pay attention to that. I know spend uh see
33:00 — Elena Luneva
if you can have a conversation with a financial analyst and go get into the numbers and just absorb 10% more of what
33:06 — Elena Luneva
in the world they're all talking about instead of being like oh I will at some point.
33:12 — Elena Luneva
The second piece is think about the words that you're using. So are you talking about engagement?
33:18 — Elena Luneva
Can you translate that to what is the revenue per user? Are you trying to defend your road map or instead of
33:26 — Elena Luneva
defending your road map, say here's the investments that we're making in the future of the business and here's the outcomes we're going to get. And if you
33:32 — Elena Luneva
don't have that those numbers, well that's that's a question for you to
33:37 — Randy Silver
start asking. Fantastic. So yeah, of course I forgot to mention people can of course take
33:43 — Randy Silver
your course, they can subscribe to your Substack. One thing I like to tell people that I coach uh is you have the
33:50 — Randy Silver
skill set to do this because this is discovery. Yeah, it's simply going to people and asking
33:56 — Randy Silver
them what what do you need to make a better decision? What's the language you use? Help me understand a little bit
34:02 — Randy Silver
better. They generally want you to help them. Exactly. That's a that's really good
34:07 — Elena Luneva
advice. If you talk in the language that people want to absorb information, they're much more likely to do that.
34:14 — Randy Silver
Elena, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Randy. Happy to be here.
34:21
[Music]
34:28
The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.
34:34 — Randy Silver
And me, Randy Silver, also host by night. and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping
34:41 — Randy Silver
their teams to do amazing work. Luron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
34:48
And our theme music is from product community legend Arie Kitler's band, POW. Thanks to them for letting us use
34:55
their track.
35:01
[Music]
About the author
The Product Experience
Join our podcast hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver for in-depth conversations with some of the best product people around the world! Every week they chat with people in the know, covering the topics that matter to you - solving real problems, developing awesome products, building successful teams and developing careers. Find out more, subscribe, and access all episodes on The Product Experience homepage.
