What financial fluency really means for PMs (and what it doesn’t)

I don’t come from a finance background. My path into Product was very much through UX, technology, and delivery. And yet, over the past few years, I kept seeing a recurring theme on my LinkedIn feed and in product conversations:

PMs need to become more commercially-minded.

Not just “build great products” but be able to explain how product work ties into revenue, growth, and business outcomes.

That prompted me to dig deeper. And there were a few sessions that hugely shaped my thinking as we started working on Product Seed:

1) Simonetta Batteiger’s financial modelling workshop

This was one of the most useful introductions to the fundamentals: balance sheets, income statements, cash flow, P&L - and how they all connect.

It gave me a much better understanding of how companies view performance and how product decisions ultimately feed into those numbers.

If you have the time and interest to dive into this as a PM, it’s incredibly valuable. Workshops like Simonetta’s give you a strong foundation for understanding the full business picture, which absolutely helps when you’re having deeper commercial conversations. What matters most though is being able to frame product work in a way that connects to business outcomes, even if you’re not building full financial models yourself.

2) Rebecca Mortimer’s talk at ProductTank Edinburgh 

Rebecca made financial modelling feel accessible. She showed how you can start small, build simple models based on assumptions, and refine as you learn.

Her message was: don’t be scared to take a first stab - an imperfect model is still better than none when justifying product work. That perspective really stuck with me.

3) Nacho Bassino’s talk at Mind the Product

Nacho went deep into ROI - how different tools attempt to solve it, and the complexity of pulling together data across multiple sources to connect product work to financial impact.

His talk made one thing clear: a lot of good thinking exists already but it still requires PMs to stitch everything together manually.

All of that fed into the thinking behind Product Seed.

We’re not trying to turn PMs into finance professionals but we are trying to remove the friction that stops PMs from having proper business conversations.

Because the truth is - product work always drives business outcomes. The real gap is having the tools that help you make those connections visible, realistic, and trackable.

That’s what we’re building:

• A structured, but lightweight way to frame product initiatives around business outcomes

• Connecting product assumptions to commercial reality (sales pipelines, retention, revenue growth, internal efficiencies)

• Enabling teams to track how outcomes develop over time

• And crucially: feeding those learnings back into future prioritisation, without drowning in dashboards and spreadsheets

I’d love to hear from other Product Managers:

What helped you become more financially confident in your product role?

Do you feel equipped to talk about business impact today - or is it still a bit of a black box?

Coming soon:

• How we’re building differently and integrating with existing tools

Stay in the loop

Follow me on LinkedIn and Product Seed to stay updated on progress towards our prototype, and sign up on productseed.com to be the first inline to take it for a spin!