Unlocking Product Growth: How Product Teams Can Drive Real Commercial Impact

How do you get your product teams thinking more commercially?

It's a question that’s been coming up repeatedly in our conversations with product leaders recently, so naturally we made it the focus of our latest event.

Led brilliantly by Maria Kucheryavaya, we spent the morning openly sharing challenges, frustrations, and solutions around unlocking commercial growth within product teams.

Here's just a few of the key themes we discussed:

• Balancing product and commercial goals without creating internal friction. How do you align KPIs effectively to avoid teams pulling in opposite directions?

• Protecting user experience while driving monetisation. Where’s the sweet spot between commercial success and customer delight?

• Transparency around product roadmaps. Sometimes communicating what you aren't prioritising is just as important as highlighting current initiatives, to provide context around your team's focus and decisions.

And one question that divided the room: Should product teams fully own revenue?

If you'd like to learn more about our product leadership events and how you can get involved, get in touch with our Head of Product, Louise Smith, for all the details.

💡 Download the key takeaways here 💡

Takeaways:

1. Transparent Prioritisation

• Pitching sessions: Ideas from across the business are evaluated against consistent criteria such as revenue impact, effort, and strategic fit.

• Spend as much time discussing what you’re not doing—and why as you do on roadmap inclusions.

• Balance the roadmap with both functional improvements and user-delighting initiatives each quarter (using models like the “hierarchy of needs” triangle).

2. Better Structures & Alignment

• Cross-functional leadership groups with shared KPIs (e.g. product + commercial + marketing) reduce silos and align incentives.

• KPI trees unify team-level metrics under one business outcome, ensuring teams have ownership while driving toward shared goals.

• Lifecycle-based squads (acquisition, conversion, retention) create accountability for each stage of the funnel, connecting directly to commercial value.

3. Shared Ownership & Healthy Tension

• Encourage healthy tension between product and commercial teams, but ensure both have shared accountability.

• Define shared KPIs (e.g. retention, attach rate) while allowing teams to own the levers they can influence (activation, UX, campaigns).

• Keep product leaders at the table in commercial discussions to explain the “why” behind trade-offs and customer impacts.

Common Challenges

• Inconsistent KPI definitions across teams → confusion and misalignment.

• Product held accountable for outcomes they can’t fully control.

• Short-term revenue targets vs long-term product sustainability.

• Conflicting incentives tied to clashing metrics (bonuses, reviews).

• Product teams risk turning into client-servicing arms when demands override strategy.

• Global market priorities pulling against long-term product vision.

• Poor/incomplete data undermining ROI cases.

• Pressure to show fast impact, even when experiments take time to yield results.

• Over-optimising for revenue (ads, upsells, subscriptions) at the expense of user experience.

Solutions in Practice

• Build cross-functional KPIs to unify incentives.

• Maintain transparency in prioritisation and openly share trade-offs.

• Align squads to lifecycle stages to ensure accountability.

• Protect the user experience while meeting commercial needs.