Takeaways: From Jira Junkies to Profit Prophets

Takeaways

📘 Most product teams don't understand revenue. They know user needs, but not what closes a deal. They talk to customers, but rarely prospects. That's a big gap. Product decisions often ignore willingness to pay, sales pressure, and retention blockers - because they're seen as “someone else's job.”

📘 They moved from slow waterfall to fast Agile. But fast doesn't mean right. Shipping the wrong thing quickly just piles up tech debt and wastes money. In today's world - where capital is expensive and every headcount counts - teams need to prove impact. Not story points.

📘 Product education focuses on craft, not commercial understanding. Most PMs hear about financial literacy only when they hit VP level. By then, it's almost too late. It should start earlier - with simple questions: how does the company make money? What metrics does the CFO care about? What would make a customer renew?

📘 Most teams track too many things. That spreadsheet with 35+ metrics? Nobody's driving any of them. Instead, pick a few business-aligned metrics. Review them weekly. Cut the noise. Track progress. Adapt fast.

📘 Teams often mirror the platform, not the customer. But real impact comes when teams are aligned to outcomes across the journey - activation, engagement, retention. It's uncomfortable. It creates overlap. But it gets results. Features don't win markets. Experiences do.

📘 Should product own revenue? Yes. Every team is a revenue team. The pushback - “we can't control the sale”- is weak. Sales can't control it either. But everyone contributes. R&D should have revenue targets. Even platform teams. Even engineers. Especially engineers.

📘 Some decisions are art, not science. Outdated UI killing deals? You won't have hard numbers - until it's too late. Use industry benchmarks, customer signals, support tickets, and experience. Know when to trust your gut. But gut ≠ guess. Back it with rationale.

📘 A product team that costs $1M/year must deliver $3–5M/year in value. Most bets won't pay off. The few that do must cover the rest. That's the math. If your initiative isn't worth at least $5M/year, why build it?

📘 Don't get paralysed by perfect metrics. Just start. Review every 30–90 days. Adjust. Test assumptions fast. Kill slow-moving re-platform projects before they kill you.

📘 Empowered teams aren't just given freedom. They're given trust. Right now, fear dominates. Layoffs. Burnout. Board pressure. The result? Output obsession. Rebuilding safety and alignment starts at the top. Executives must cascade clarity, not anxiety.

📘 Forget product books for a bit. Read about valuations. Talk to your CFO. Sit in on sales calls. Study why companies grow - or die. Read business case studies. Learn the language of money.

Top Quotes

💬 Incentives and goals drive behavior... if product and engineering are incentivized based on delivery or outputs, then there's no motivation or change to behavior to really understand what's driving the business.

💬 We default to building software, which is super expensive and most often than not, unvalidated

💬 We are still at a point where we're keeping engineering in a basement and there's so much discomfort - they're locked away, stop talking to them

💬 People are so anxious and what people do when they're anxious is they do the easiest thing to control, which is build output, output, output.

💬 Everybody talks about empowered teams, everyone loves that term, but nobody actually is - and it starts at the top.

Episode: Mackenzie Hughes & Tara Goldman: From Jira Junkies to Profit Prophets