The transition to a public company drastically changes a PM's role. Every initiative, including experiments, must be backed by data and tied to a clear return on investment. The "build for fun" or "hackathon project" mindset disappears, replaced by rigorous financial justification and frugality.

During a transformation from services to product, identify and commercialize the reusable tools that services teams have already built to support clients. Instead of starting from scratch, productizing these existing "mini-products" aligns them with the broader product strategy, saves development time, and leverages proven solutions.

Pendo's CPO warns that scaling isn't just about replicating processes for more teams. Leaders must simultaneously build coordination systems (design reviews, clear communication) while fighting to maintain the "maniacal focus on the customer" and rapid innovation that characterize small teams.

To prevent its new mobile app from simply replicating its existing web platform, Irembo framed the mobile team's goal as competing with the web team. Their key metric was shifting user traffic from web to mobile for the same services. This created a competitive dynamic that forced innovation and differentiation.

To innovate quickly without being bogged down by technical debt, portfolio companies should ring-fence new AI development. By outsourcing it and treating it as a separate "skunk works" project, the core tech team can focus on existing systems while the new initiative succeeds or fails on its own merits.

Post-IPO, sales-driven feature requests can derail the roadmap. Pendo's CPO advises creating a formal process, often with a dedicated program manager, to analyze commits for broad applicability and explicitly calculate the opportunity cost against the strategic roadmap before approving them.

Building a true platform requires designing components to be general-purpose, not use-case specific. For instance, creating one Kanban board for sales, support, and engineering. This thoughtful approach imposes a ~20% development 'tax' upfront but creates massive speed and leverage in the future.

A product leader should actively manage development by allocating effort into three buckets: future big bets, core foundation (stability/tech debt), and growth/optimization. The resource allocation isn't fixed; it must dynamically shift based on the product's maturity and immediate business goals.

An internal incubator’s biggest mistake is acting like an external startup. Finding product-market fit is insufficient. Lasting success requires achieving "product-company fit" by deeply understanding and aligning with the parent company's internal business units, strategic goals, and unique challenges.