The Revenue-Centric Product Strategy: Balancing Growth and Profitability in Uncertain Times
Why the era of growth-first product management is over and what comes next
The past decade of product management was dominated by a single North Star: growth. Fueled by allot of venture capital and low interest rates, tech companies prioritized user acquisition, engagement, and retention above all else, often with profitability as a distant future concern.
In my opinion, that era has ended!
I've watched this shift happen in a few cases, companies that I advise and in industry news and it's been both surprising, in terms of how fast things shifted and also how necessary. The companies are are no longer asking "How fast can we grow?" but rather "How can we grow sustainably?" The difference between those two questions is everything.
Today's economic realities demand a more balanced approach. Investors, boards, and executives are asking tougher questions about unit economics, payback periods, and paths to profitability. Product teams accustomed to optimizing solely for growth and engagement are being asked to deliver revenue impact, often without sacrificing the growth metrics they've been measured on for years.
This isn't about abandoning growth. It's about adopting what I call a "revenue-centric product strategy" that thoughtfully balances growth initiatives with profitability drivers1.
The Ground Has Shifted Beneath Us
Let me paint you a picture of how dramatically things have changed. Rising interest rates have fundamentally altered the economics of tech companies. When capital was nearly free, the present value of distant future profits justified years of losses. Today's higher costs of capital demand closer-term returns.
Think of Uber's journey. Their 2019 IPO prospectus literally stated “We expect our operating expenses to increase significantly in the foreseeable future, and we may not achieve profitability.” Fast forward to 2023, and their investor communications center on "Profitable growth at scale." This isn't just corporate speak, it reflects both market maturity and completely transformed investor expectations.
The market has reset expectations about what companies are worth, with greater emphasis on sustainable unit economics and profitability. Buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm saw its valuation drop from over around $28 billion to under $3 billion as interest rates rose and the market recalibrated expectations for fintechs without clear paths to profitability (it has recovered to about $19 Billion in 2025).
After years where growth could hide fundamental business challenges, there's more focus on durable business models and sustainable competitive advantages. Netflix's transition from subscriber growth at all costs to a more balanced approach involving ad-supported tiers, password-sharing crackdowns, and content efficiency demonstrates this shift to business fundamentals.
A New Framework for Product Thinking
A revenue-centric product strategy doesn't abandon growth—it integrates revenue and profitability considerations into your product thinking at every level. The framework I've developed centers on three core principles.
First, segment by revenue potential instead of treating all users equally. You have current high-value users who generate significant revenue, potential high-value users who match the profile but aren't monetizing fully, value-constrained users who derive value but have legitimate constraints on monetization, and low-probability users unlikely to generate significant revenue in the foreseeable future.
Slack evolved their product strategy from treating all workspace users similarly to identifying "economic buyers" within organizations and developing specific features for them. This segmentation approach increased conversion to paid plans without sacrificing overall user growth.
Second, evaluate initiatives across a Revenue Impact Matrix with two dimensions: revenue impact timeline and revenue impact mechanism. Timeline includes immediate impact within a quarter, near-term impact within a year, and long-term impact beyond a year. Mechanism covers direct revenue through pricing and packaging, conversion from free to paid, retention of paying customers, and expansion of revenue from existing customers.
Third, create a profitability-adjusted roadmap that adds economic profile as a critical third dimension alongside traditional impact and effort considerations. By adding this dimension, you can make more detailed prioritization decisions that balance growth, user experience, and financial health.
Five Strategies That Actually Work
The first strategy is value pathway optimization. Instead of optimizing isolated conversion points, map and optimize the entire pathway from initial value to revenue. Map value moments where users realize significant value, connect value to monetization through natural transitions, reduce friction in revenue flows, and measure value-to-revenue velocity.
Notion observed that users who created multiple different types of content were more likely to convert to paid plans. Instead of immediately pushing free users to upgrade, they focused on helping users discover diverse use cases—accelerating the "value realization" that naturally leads to conversion.
In her SaaStr talk, Notion’s CRO Olivia Nottebohm explains that early on Notion “put templates on our website so that users could quickly get into the flow of the product and immediately understand how they could use it, how they could find the usability quickly and how that product was going to work for them.” In other words, instead of gating features behind paywalls, they leaned into a gallery of diverse, community-created templates, spanning docs, wikis, project boards, calendars, etc.—so users would experience multiple distinct use cases right away.
The second strategy involves pricing and packaging innovation. Rethinking how you package and price your product can often deliver faster revenue impact than new feature development. Structure tiers around distinct use cases and user segments, design packages that naturally expand as customer usage grows, thoughtfully distribute features across tiers based on user willingness to pay, and incorporate consumption-based elements that scale with value delivered.
Airtable transformed their business by shifting from simple per-user pricing to a sophisticated model combining user seats, workflow automations, and interface usage. This approach better captured value from different customer segments while creating natural expansion paths.
The third strategy focuses on targeted feature development. Not all features are created equal from a revenue perspective. Prioritize conversion catalysts that address reasons users hesitate to pay, expansion enablers that increase usage and justify higher tiers, retention strengtheners that reduce churn risk for high-value segments, and revenue accelerators that shorten the time from initial use to payment.
The fourth strategy builds revenue experimentation systems. Apply the same experimental repetition to revenue that you apply to product experience through A/B testing infrastructure for pricing, offer optimization, revenue feature testing, and segment-specific experiments.
The fifth strategy involves value capture rebalancing. Ensure you're capturing appropriate value while delivering customer value through regular free-paid boundary reviews, value-based feature prioritization, monetization timing optimization, and pricing power assessment.
Maintaining Balance
The most successful companies maintain balance between revenue focus and product vision through the 70/20/10 investment rule: 70% to optimizing current revenue streams, 20% to emerging opportunities with clear revenue potential, and 10% to exploratory initiatives that might open future revenue streams.
Rather than treating innovation as separate from revenue considerations, integrate them by connecting innovation initiatives to future revenue hypotheses, establishing clear graduation criteria for moving ideas from exploration to core roadmap, and setting explicit timelines for innovation initiatives to demonstrate revenue potential.
The Human Side of Change
Transitioning to a revenue-centric approach requires thoughtful change management, especially for teams accustomed to focusing solely on growth and engagement. Help your team understand that revenue isn't opposed to user value, it's a measure of sustainable value creation that enables continued investment in the product.
Atlassian frames their revenue growth not as a business goal but as an enabler of their mission to help teams work better together. This framing helps their product teams see revenue initiatives as aligned with, not opposed to, their user focus.
From day one, Atlassian’s corporate materials lead with their mission “to unleash the potential of every team” and only then discuss financials. For example, their S-1/424B4 filing opens by explaining the company was founded “to help software teams work better together” and presents revenue as a means to scale that mission, not the end goal itself
Incorporate revenue metrics into your definition of success without abandoning engagement and satisfaction metrics. Create balanced scorecards that combine user metrics, experience metrics, and revenue metrics.
What This Means for You
To begin implementing a more revenue-centric approach, assess your current state by examining how explicitly revenue considerations factor into your roadmap decisions, what percentage of your roadmap directly impacts revenue metrics, and how sophisticated your understanding of unit economics and revenue drivers is.
For quick wins in the next 30 days, create a simple revenue impact assessment for your current roadmap items, identify one high-potential pricing or packaging experiment to run, and partner with finance to build a basic revenue impact model for product decisions.
A revenue-centric product strategy isn't about sacrificing growth or user experience for short-term profit. It's about creating sustainable value that benefits both users and the business. By thoughtfully balancing growth initiatives with profitability drivers, you can build products that thrive in today's more demanding economic environment.
The most successful product leaders won't be those who simply chase revenue at all costs, they'll be those who find the sweet spot where user value and business value reinforce each other, creating virtuous cycles of sustainable growth.
What shifts have you made toward a more revenue-centric approach? What challenges have you encountered?