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A product manager I know got let go after three years. Good with engineering. Great with UX. Solid on agile.
The feedback? ‘We need our product managers to have a commercial side to what they bring to the table.’
That quote is from Jon Matheson’s piece on Product Coalition, and it landed hard when I first read it. Jon was doing everything right by the traditional PM playbook. Launches, team management, user research. But his boss told him straight: ‘We need a product manager who understands monetization and how product decisions impact revenue, COGS, and expenses.’
He lost his job because nobody taught him the money side.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most PM training skips this entirely. We get certified in discovery, delivery, strategy, stakeholder management. Almost nobody teaches you how to read a P&L or defend your roadmap in terms your CFO actually cares about.
Sebastian Mueller wrote about the four biggest pricing mistakes on Product Coalition back in 2020, and his observation still stings: ‘Pricing is incredibly important, yet very hard to nail down properly.’ Sebastian found that teams routinely underprice so badly their unit margins go negative. They literally lose money by scaling.
Think about that for a second. The better your go-to-market works, the faster you go broke.
What changed for Jon? He went back and learned the commercial side the hard way. In a follow-up piece, he describes walking into a GTM strategy meeting where the CFO wanted to see revenue projections, costs, margins, and ROI laid out in detail. Not user stories. Not sprint velocity. Financial evidence.
Jon writes that the moment he started presenting product decisions as investments with expected returns rather than features with estimated timelines, everything shifted. The CFO stopped being an obstacle and started being an ally.
Nicole Segerer made a related point on my podcast that stuck with me: ‘Evidence-based decision making is not just about user data. The most overlooked evidence in product teams is financial evidence.’
Most product teams can tell you their NPS to the decimal. Ask about gross margin per feature line and you get silence.
That gap is where the next generation of product leaders will separate themselves. Not by building better features. By understanding which features actually make money.
What is the one financial question about your own product that you genuinely cannot answer today? Reply and tell me. I read every one.