Building P&L Models That Win Executive Trust
From product metrics to company leadership
Last quarter while advising an education company I reviewed a thoughtful product roadmap. Well meaning feature requests that were customer driven, but when I asked how they’re planning to sell the product, I got met with crickets. To a point where I re-arranged the whole roadmap and put the GTM, customer testing, pricing and positioning up front. If there is no market adoption, there is no reason to spend time and money building even the best product. Grounded in their P&L and how the company makes money to go through the scenarios and costs of not approaching this way. It completely changed their thinking and approach, this is why I think it is soooo important for PMs especially to ground their thinking of the what and why to build and how it will move the company.
To spotlight my April cohort of Go-to-market strategy for Product Leaders (featured in collections by Maven and Kyle Poyar!), I’m doing a lighting lesson on P&L and Scenario Planning for PMs and it’s not too late to signup to arm yourself with these tools to change your thinking into how to work on the company
The Translation Gap That's Limiting Your Career
I've sat on both sides of the table. At Braintrust, I transformed a talent marketplace into an AI-powered platform generating $285M in GSV. At Nextdoor, I owned significant portions of IPO revenue, growing it from 0. One pattern emerged consistently:
Product leaders who translate their work into financial language get more resources, more support, and faster promotions. If nothing else it was an adage that surfaced over and over again “good things come to those who advocate for their projects way ahead.” In fact in my first two weeks as VP of Product at GoFundMe, I spent time with the CFO to really understand our P&L as that will help me make better decisions.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice from a past example:
The head of partnerships and I had the hypothesis that if we just put 1 engineer on creating reusable components across various Nextdoor surfaces, we would be able to make a significant impact to revenue. However, in order to get the approval we needed to have the prospects lined up and show our CEO and CFO the financials to get the approvals. Without the numbers working we would be at 0, by showing the numbers we were able to add an additional $10M in revenue and get more resource investments for subsequent projects like maps.
What Actually Works in Today's Economic Climate
Forget vague promises about "future growth potential." In budget meetings and investment discussions, I've found these specific approaches drive executive buy-in:
Connect engagement directly to revenue When we were positioning launching a new mapping experience at Nextdoor, I didn't just report the [X]% engagement increase that we showed in tests. I showed how each minute of additional engagement translated to $X in advertising revenue, each new ad format translated to adoption and a new way to engage and grow our customer base with a clear calculation path executives could verify themselves.
Quantify the cost structure behind your features Make sure you have the costs, expenses alongside the timing ard revenue projections.
Present multiple scenarios with financial outcomes The executive team at OpenTablle was skeptical until I showed three adoption scenarios—conservative, target, and optimistic—each with corresponding P&L impacts. The CFO later told me, "This is the first product presentation where I didn't have to ask 'but what if it doesn't work?” or even “what are you talking about?”
Building Your P&L Translation Toolkit
Here are three practical tools you can implement this week:
The Metric-to-Money Map: For each key product metric, document exactly how it connects to a revenue or cost line item. Example: DAU → session time → ad impressions → revenue at X CPM. But understand your business model and plug in the right metrics.
The Unit Economics Calculator: Create a simple spreadsheet showing the cost and revenue per user/transaction at different scale points. This reveals the true financial dynamics of your product.
The Executive One-Pager: Distill your initiative into financial terms: investment required, expected returns, payback period, and 3 key risks with mitigation strategies. Answer for them: What is it? Why does it matter? How much does it cost me? When do I get it? What are the tradeoffs I am making? Why should I care?
From Theory to Your Next Budget Meeting
Want to see how these principles work on a real P&L model? I'm hosting a free 30-minute workshop this Thursday March 20th at 12pm PST on "Building P&L Models That Win Executive Trust."
We’ll
Walk through what is P&L
A real case study (with fake data) on P&L, Investment case and Scenario Planning
Already, 250+ product leaders have registered to sharpen this critical skill. The workshop is completely free and designed to give you practical tools you can use immediately. Plus if you signup I’ll send you the recording, notes and template we worked through, even if you can’t make the time you’ll have the tools at your fingertips.
RSVP here for Thursday's workshop
This session offers a taste of my upcoming course Go-to-Market Strategy for Product Leaders, where we'll dive deeper into aligning product work with business impact focusing on 4 key areas GTM, Finance, Executive Presence and putting it all together into a personal Growth Engine.
Comment below with your biggest challenge in communicating product value to executives—I'll address the most common themes in Thursday's session.
See you Thursday, Elena