When a business is built through service-heavy acquisitions, “going product-led” isn’t a tweak — it’s a total rewiring. It means fewer offerings, bigger bets, and walking away from profitable work that doesn’t fit the vision. Done right, you turn overlapping portfolios into a scalable platform. Done wrong, you end up with ten roadmaps… and one very tired slide deck.

In today’s tighter economic climate, software capitalisation has become a critical lever for product teams. By treating certain development costs as long-term investments rather than immediate expenses, companies can reduce short-term financial pressure and better align with investor expectations around profitable growth. For product managers, this means increased scrutiny, closer collaboration with finance, and a shift in roadmap priorities toward capitalisable work. While not all valuable work qualifies, understanding capitalisation helps PMs navigate funding decisions without losing sight of product truth.

Exploring the complex reality of product roadmaps. Especially in the high-stakes moment of presenting them at a Sales Kickoff. While roadmaps can be powerful tools for alignment, storytelling, and strategic focus, they can easily be misinterpreted as fixed delivery schedules or misused as sales theatre.

The article emphasizes that strong roadmaps don’t just appear, they’re the result of months of collaborative work: identifying valuable customer problems, aligning across teams, and exploring solutions through research, co-discovery, and experimentation. When rooted in real insight, a roadmap becomes a reflection of shared intent.

But when they’re rushed, politicized, or presented without context, roadmaps can do more harm than good. Creating false expectations, undermining trust, and pushing teams toward building for deadlines instead of solving meaningful problems.

The takeaway? Great product leaders use roadmaps as a conversation, not a commitment. They share the thinking behind the plan, stay honest about uncertainty, and always prioritize customer value, trusting that business success will follow.

Product management has always operated between structure and intuition. Despite advances in data, tools, and frameworks, building products often still feels like educated guesswork and that’s not a failure, it’s the nature of the work.

Structure brings clarity: data and frameworks help teams prioritise and measure, but they don't remove risk or make decisions. Judgement remains essential: many pivotal decisions stem from context, experience, and instinct, not just dashboards.

With AI, the toolkit has evolved, helping teams accelerate early thinking and reduce grunt work. But AI doesn’t replace the need to understand customers, evaluate risk, or define vision. The real craft lies in knowing when to apply structure and when to lean on experience.

Ultimately, great product leadership comes from balancing art and science, then knowing which to trust in any given moment.