The Most Underrated Skill in Product Leaders

When it comes to evaluating product managers, most companies tend to reach for the same familiar playbook.

Product design challenges: “Design an alarm clock for the blind.”
Metrics questions: “How would you measure the success of Cash on Delivery for Amazon?” or “Doordash orders are down 20%, what’s your triage plan?”
Behavioral questions: “Tell me about a time you failed.”
Architecture questions: “Design Instagram’s backend.” You’ll often see these at tech giants like Google or Meta.

These are all important. But if we’re being honest—they’re table stakes.

There’s one skill that rarely makes the list but is absolutely essential the higher you go as a product leader:

A basic understanding of accounting and corporate finance.

Yep. You read that right. Debits, credits, gross margins, free cash flow—the kind of stuff buried in 10-Ks and 10-Qs.

I’m constantly surprised by the number of senior product leaders I run into who have never taken the time to understand the unit economics of their own business. Let alone connect what their team is building to the company’s income statement.

That’s a blind spot.

The last thing you want is to learn about your product’s impact from an activist investor… in a proxy fight.

Don’t know what that means? Search “Elliott Management” or “Carl Icahn.” You’re welcome!

Now, I get it—finance is supposed to handle all this. And sure, at most companies, there is a finance team running these numbers.

But the connection between product and finance is usually paper-thin.

In fact, Sales is often more plugged into Finance than Product ever is.

That’s backwards. Sales outcomes are lagging indicators.

Product executives are best positioned to have a leading intuition on product roadmap’s impact on financials.

And I know what some PMs are probably thinking:
“Sales and Finance are too short-term focused. We’re building for the long-term!”

I get it. I actually agree with you.

But here’s the thing…

Let’s say you lead merchant onboarding at Shopify. Your team ships a series of features that reduce the onboarding time by 10 minutes.

You celebrate. That’s a win, right?

But what if, after all that, the number of merchants signing up doesn’t change?

No bump in GMV. No increase in revenue. Just a shinier process for the same number of users.

That’s not impact—that’s busy work.

And busy work is the enemy of good product leadership.

As a product executive, your job is to make sure your team is doing productive work, not just shipping features.

So what can you do?

Go beyond the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

Look at how your team’s goals translate into the company’s income statement.

If you’re launching a new feature or product, estimate how much incremental revenue it could generate.

If you’re improving efficiency, calculate the potential lift in gross margins, EBITDA, or free cash flow.

The closer you can tie your product’s outcomes to financial impact, the easier it becomes to secure funding from your CFO and CEO.

And what if you’re working on something exploratory?

Even then, back-of-the-envelope math to understand the margin impact is your friend.
Estimate the cost, model the upside, and track the probability of success.

When the purse string tightens—and it always does—you’ll be in a much better position to defend the bets you want to keep.

Put simply:

Great product leaders don’t just drive OKRs.

They take a crucial step further, connecting their work directly to the financial heartbeat of the company – the income statement.

That’s the underrated skill that separates the good from the truly exceptional product executives.

To borrow Mr. Buffett’s quote:

I’m a better Investor because I’m a Product Manager, and
I’m a better Product Manager because I’m an Investor.

P.S. – yes, I may have Ghiblified one of my images to get the cover photo 🙂