Former BetterRx CEO Ben Clark sees product management as a direct revenue generator. A product manager's core value is finding significant, monetizable customer pain. When they succeed in creating strong product-market fit, it makes the jobs of sales and marketing easier and directly fuels company growth.

To be truly successful, a product leader cannot just focus on features and users. They must operate as the head of their product's business, with a deep understanding of P&Ls, revenue drivers, and capital allocation. Without this business acumen, they risk fundamentally undercutting their product's potential impact and success.

A one-time meeting with finance is "surface level" advice. To truly build financial acumen, PMs must integrate hard financial targets and business levers directly into their squad's goals. This creates an enduring, operational fluency that informs daily product decisions.

It's not enough to improve engagement or NPS. A product manager's job is to understand and articulate how that metric connects to a financial outcome for the business. Whether it's growth, margin, or profitability, you must explain to leadership why your product goals matter to the bottom line.

Product Management's core responsibility is to drive the business growth of a product by delivering profitable customer value. Technical skills and building are means to an end, not the end itself. This business focus remains constant even as tools like AI change.

It is a product manager's job to understand the company's financial goals. Instead of waiting for leadership to share this information, great PMs take ownership by actively seeking it out. This means building relationships with finance and other departments to understand the metrics that truly matter to the business.

If a product manager cannot conduct pricing research or understand financial models, their role is reduced to managing a Jira backlog, not driving product strategy. This is a symptom of poor hiring, indicating the company has hired a "backlog administrator," not a strategic leader.

Early in a PM career, credibility is built faster by executing quickly and demonstrating a clear link to business revenue, rather than trying to come up with the most innovative ideas. Understanding how the business makes money is paramount for new PMs.

The most critical skill gaps for product managers are not technical but relational and financial. The inability to make a compelling business case to diverse audiences and to move from a cost-only to a full profit-and-loss mindset are primary reasons for failure in the role.