Speak the Language of Business: Connecting Product Management to Leadership

Product managers love their jargon; executives love results. When those two worlds collide, product management rarely wins—because leadership doesn’t fund vocabulary, they fund outcomes.

Backlogs and roadmaps. Personas and prioritization. Experiments, hypotheses, agile principles, and iterative learning cycles. These concepts work well inside product teams.

But when product managers step into conversations with senior leadership—especially those executives outside product and engineering—they often lose the room. Not because the ideas are bad, but because they’re framed like product problems instead of business decisions.

Why Product Managers Get Lost in Translation

At an industry conference, an agile consultant claimed that every senior executive should attend a Scrum certification class. Seriously?!?

Executives don’t communicate in the internal language of product development. Executives think in terms of revenue, profitability, market share, risk management, and capital allocation. They care about business models, customer impact, and competitive positioning.

Product managers, by contrast, tend to focus on how things get built. That disconnect shows up fast.

If you’ve ever watched a senior leader lean back in their chair and say, “Help me understand why this matters,” you’ve already lost credibility. Not because leadership doesn’t value product, but because the conversation never made it out of product-speak.

When we say:

• “We want to run an experiment,” executives hear uncertainty.

• “This is on the roadmap,” they hear an uncommitted wish list.

• “We’re delivering value,” they hear a claim with no balance sheet attached.

Leadership isn’t opposed to learning; rather, they struggle with vague ambiguity.

Translate Product Language into Business Language

If you want influence and buy-in, you need to translate from product to business. Not by dumbing things down—but by reframing them in terms executives already use to make decisions.

Instead of saying:

“We want to build this feature to test a hypothesis.”

Say:

“We believe this will increase conversion by 10–15%, which translates to roughly $500–600K in additional quarterly revenue.”

Now you’re not pitching a feature. You’re proposing an investment.

And every investment triggers the same executive questions:

• What’s the upside?

• What’s the risk?

• What’s the expected return?

If you can’t answer those, the discussion stalls—no matter how elegant the solution.

Frame Experiments as Risk Mitigation, Not Learning

Executives don’t fund learning. They fund decisions.

Experiments only matter when they clearly reduce risk around spend, staffing, or timing. So stop positioning them as curiosity-driven exploration and start framing them as capital protection.

Instead of:

“We want to experiment before committing.”

Say:

“Before allocating six months of development and a full team, we’re running a controlled test to validate demand. This costs three weeks and two engineers—and could save us $1.2M in opportunity cost if the signal isn’t there.”

That’s not uncertainty. That’s discipline.

Use Portfolio Thinking—Like an Investor Would

Leadership doesn’t want a list of features. They want to know whether the company is allocating capital intentionally.

Product leaders should frame initiatives as a portfolio of bets with different risk and return profiles:

• Core Enhancements — Investments that sustain and defend existing revenue

• Growth Bets — Initiatives that expand markets, segments, or usage

• Options / Moonshots— High-risk bets with asymmetric upside

For example:

“This quarter, 60% of our investment protects existing revenue, 30% fuels growth, and 10% explores future opportunities. If leadership wants faster growth, we’ll need to rebalance—and accept the additional risk that comes with it.”

Now product strategy becomes a business conversation, not a feature negotiation.

Tie Product Metrics Directly to Money

Velocity, cycle time, and engagement are useful internal signals. They are not decision drivers for executives.

Remember, your leadership cares about:

• Revenue

• Margins

• Costs

• Retention

• Customer lifetime value

So don’t stop at activity metrics.

Instead of:

“Engagement increased by 20%.”

Say:

“That engagement increase led to a 5% lift in retention, resulting in approximately $2M in additional annual recurring revenue.”

And sometimes, the most credible move is killing an idea. “We stopped this initiative after early data showed full adoption would move revenue by less than 1%. It wasn’t a product failure—it was a good business decision.”

That’s how trust is built.

Speak in Terms of Competitive Advantage

Executives aren’t just asking what you’re building. They’re asking why it matters in the market.

Frame initiatives in terms of:

• Competitive differentiation. How does this help us win?

• Customer economics. How does this improve lifetime value or reduce customer acquisition cost?

• Market positioning. Does this move us upmarket or strengthen our pricing power?

“Keeping up with competitors” is not a strategy. It’s table stakes. A stronger framing sounds like, “This capability enables premium pricing in regulated accounts, where competitors struggle to comply.”

The Business-Savvy Product Manager

The most effective product managers aren’t merely experts in problem discovery and prioritization. They’re business strategists who understand risk and return—and can explain product decisions in those terms.

Drop the agile jargon. Frame initiatives as investments. Describe experiments as risk mitigation. Talk in terms of risk, return, and competitive advantage.

When product managers start talking like business leaders, leadership listens.

A Practical Tool: Money Stories

My longtime friend and product management guru Rich Mironov advocates for money stories—simple models that force clarity.

A classic example:

(# of target customers) × (price or upsell amount) × (% adoption estimate)

Because in the end, every executive conversation becomes a story about money—whether you tell it explicitly or not.

Read more on Rich Mironov's Product Bytes: https://richmironov.substack.com/p/moneystories