Successful Product Communication: Justifying Your Product Bets

Successful product leaders recognize the importance of communicating the “why” behind their decisions to executive stakeholders and cross-functional teams. Further, they understand that simply presenting raw data won’t get the job done. To build alignment and reinforce their strategic vision, product leaders must convey a precise and compelling narrative to stakeholders. Navigating the wealth of available data to identify and craft the right story can be quite the challenge, however. 

In this fourth installment of our Products to Revenue series, we’ll explore insights from industry experts on gaining cross-functional buy-in, using data to validate product bets, and ensuring product team decisions resonate across the organization.

Achieve cross-functional alignment with the right narrative

Communicating the strategic reasoning behind product bets requires more than just a list of metrics or customer feedback. To truly gain cross-functional alignment, it’s essential to create a narrative that highlights the impact and urgency of your decisions—and communicate strategies that span beyond functional boundaries.

“At every company, director is the level where you stop thinking functionally and you start thinking cross-functionally.”
– Ibrahim Bashir, VP of Product at Amplitude

Product management tools can help you analyze customer, product, and company data to identify the right story and communicate it in terms that resonate with stakeholders. Further, tools that offer      real-time data allow you to stay flexible and pivot to an alternate strategy when necessary. 

By focusing on the broader business impact of each product decision, you can foster collaboration and ensure everyone is aligned on the goals and value of upcoming initiatives. This approach also helps build trust with executives who need a clear picture of how each product decision aligns with the company’s larger objectives.

Here are two tips to help you find and communicate a compelling story that drives consensus across your organization, its partners, and even your customers.

• Tip 1: Engage early with stakeholders: Start communicating the rationale for product decisions early in the planning process to foster alignment and support. By bringing stakeholders along the journey with you, you can build early champions for your decisions – and lower the chances they’ll be questioned later down the road. 
• Tip 2: Use compelling and relevant storytelling techniques: Craft your narrative to connect emotionally with stakeholders, highlighting the impact on customers and the company’s long-term goals. Maintaining relevance between company needs and your narrative provides the highest likelihood of achieving and maintaining buy-in from all parties.

Leverage data as the backbone of product decisions

Grounding every product decision in data equips you to confidently justify choices in a way that resonates with executive leadership. When you can trace every product bet back to real data and insights, justifying your decisions becomes much simpler—and more effective. 

Platforms that can centralize your data, transform it into timely, relevant insights that connect to specific goals, and embed those insights into your team’s daily processes can help ensure that every decision your team makes is data-driven and strategically sound. Having a single source of truth for the entire organization makes it easier to demonstrate the journey from data to decision, helping you present unified, clear, and data-backed stories that drive stakeholder buy-in.

• Tip 1: Centralize data for consistency: Ensure all teams access the same, updated data, creating a foundation for aligned decision-making.

• Tip 2: Visualize data to communicate impact: Present data through charts, graphs, or dashboards to clearly illustrate the impact of each decision. Use line charts to show a data point changing over time, bar charts to compare data points across categories, and pie charts to show the relative value of parts within a whole.

Maintain customer-centric visibility across teams

Keeping customer needs at the forefront of decision-making is essential for building products that resonate. When product teams can see how their work directly benefits customers, it fosters a sense of purpose and reinforces the importance of customer-first thinking.

By centralizing data and making insights available in real-time, you can ensure that your teams have instant visibility into high-impact customer issues—driving customer-centric product bets and making it easier to justify them to stakeholders. 

Shelly La Rock describes how this approach has transformed Autodesk’s product team’s efficiency and customer focus:

“(With Productboard,) we know everything…we have all of that data now in a central place, and it’s all feeding user impact scores (and) prioritization framework scores, and it’s automatically giving our product teams immediate visibility of what those high-value items are.”
– Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence at Autodesk

Building customer impact scores into product decision-making processes can further enable smarter product bets and alignment with stakeholders. 

• Tip 1: Integrate customer impact scoring: Use a scoring system that reflects the potential customer impact of initiatives to ensure that high-value items are prioritized. Consider measuring the number of customers impacted and creating scores for factors like urgency and how closely the initiative aligns with organizational goals.

• Tip 2: Create cross-functional customer stories: Develop concise, customer-focused narratives that highlight key customer challenges and how proposed initiatives address them. Share these stories across teams to build a common understanding of customer priorities and align efforts around customer-centric goals.

Align internal and external teams with centralized data

Bringing together insights from both internal and external stakeholders creates a comprehensive perspective that supports collaboration and consensus on your product bets and decisions. Shelly La Rock describes how centralizing product data has been transformative for Autodesk’s alignment:

“We have our internal product teams with our external product teams all in the same space now…we’re able to prioritize in one place, and we’re able to make decisions as a business on one set of data instead of having to go out to 10, 12, 15 different sources of data.”
– Shelly La Rock, Head of Product Operations and Delivery Excellence at Autodesk

By creating a shared understanding and minimizing data fragmentation, you can ensure that every team—regardless of their function or location—aligns on the same strategic priorities.

• Tip 1: Consolidate data sources: Eliminate redundant data sources to create a single source of truth, ensuring that all teams are working with consistent information.
• Tip 2: Schedule regular alignment reviews: Hold cross-functional alignment meetings to review data, adjust priorities, and confirm that teams remain in sync on strategic goals.

Achieve stakeholder buy-in for every product bet

Effectively communicating and justifying product bets requires a thoughtful approach to data, storytelling, and alignment. Productboard enables product leaders to centralize and leverage data, implement transparent prioritization frameworks, and maintain a customer-centric focus—so you can gain buy-in from cross-functional teams and executives, alike.

Take the next step. Explore strategies to boost productivity and revenue in our informative eBook, Solving the Top 4 Challenges for Product Leaders. This helpful content examines the key challenges that impede product leaders’ efforts to impact revenue outcomes. And, if you haven’t already, be sure to read the previous entries in our Products to Revenue series.