Product Decisions Are Investment Decisions

A roadmap review tends to cover features and dates. The questions I find more useful are about commitment: what does approving this obligate us to, and what are we not doing because of it?

Approving a new capability means funding a team and taking on a technology commitment that needs support for as long as the product lives. It also uses management attention that something else will not get. That is an investment, and it deserves the scrutiny a capital request of similar size would get.

In my experience, it often doesn’t. The decision is treated as the product team’s, and the executives who own the budget see a list of features. But the product team cannot answer the investment questions alone. Where to commit resources and how much risk to accept are enterprise choices, and they need business, finance, technology, and product leaders in the same room.

FlowState Consulting Group provides senior product leadership, as a fractional Chief Product Officer or as strategic advisory, to leadership teams making these calls. I’ll be writing about them over the coming months.