Show me the money. How to Internet for fun and profit

Product Management for Software Engineers (part six)

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

When a product manager joins a new company or product or project among the first questions they ask needs to be “how do we make money off of this?”. I know that everyone in the tech business is there to make the world of better place, but… let’s deal with reality. If your company (with some exceptions and I’ll get to those later) isn’t making more money than it’s spending it’s not going to be around for long. At Google a VP once told me that “revenue solves almost all arguments”. Put simply — if you are unable to say how you’re contributing to the bottom line you’re likely to have a bad time.

There are four ways of looking at this:

• Contributing directly to the generation of revenue. You’re working on a feature than brings in dosh. Amazing. It’s going to be very easy to write that case for promotion because you can see just what you’re contributing.
• Enabling other people to directly generate revenue. This is harder to articulate but do not underestimate the value of teams building infrastructure and tooling. Or people and teams supporting the operation of the business. You can measure your value either in terms of how much time you saved people (because time is money) or how much you enabled the people working on user facing…