Leader Spotlight: Owning the P&L as a product leader, with Mayank Kumar

Mayank Kumar was most recently Head of Product at Policygenius (acquired by Zinnia), where he led teams focused on insurance marketplace strategy, distribution, and AI-driven customer support. He began his career in product management at Tile, helping grow the company from $10M to over $100M in revenue. Later, he served as Director of Product at WeWork, leading teams to connect the physical and digital worlds in their spaces. Mayank co-founded Nashi, a hybrid workplace platform acquired by Density, which gained traction for its flexible and personalized approach to work.

In our conversation, Mayank explains how he grounds customer problems in business goals, uses clear goals and transparent metrics to align teams, and applies financial context to prioritize work. He also shares how customer empathy and advisory boards inform strategic decisions that drive profitability and growth.

Building a business-first mindset in product management

You’ve described yourself as a business-leaning PM who puts everything in the context of the business. What does this mindset look like in practice, and why is it valuable?

I should first clarify that every product team should focus on solving customer problems and increasing customer value — that’s fundamental. Many product teams miss framing those customer problems within the context of the business. A business-leaning PM should be able to read the company's P&L or, if you work in a public company, the 10K, 10Q, or even competitors’ financial reports. That’s critical because if you only speak the language of your team or customers, you might hurt collaboration with stakeholders who speak a different language — say, sales or SEO metrics.

Starting from the business perspective gives everyone a common language. For product teams, it helps them avoid falling into the trap of optimizing problems for their team, a customer segment, or a persona that the business is not prioritizing.

No matter where you are in your career, when you talk about your work, whether it’s a feature or initiative, you should be able to articulate the “so what” clearly. Teams want to ship fast with quality. Quality comes from deep customer empathy, while speed comes from understanding business priorities and what to focus on.

How does this business-leaning approach impact how you collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders at every stage of the product lifecycle?

There are three things I focus on. First, goal setting. I like to keep it simple and clear, ideally fitting on one slide. Many companies use OKRs but often spend too much time perfecting them. I think you should be able to articulate your goals, whether for a year or six months, framing the challenges and outcomes in a sentence or two.

Then, frame your north stars or business outcomes. They could be revenue, cost metrics, or efficiency metrics. Your objectives are the biggest levers to pull this year.

Finally, the key results should specify increases or decreases in metrics impacting the P&L. If you can do that on one slide, that’s ideal. If not, you’re probably over-complicating it. Every leader should be stacking hands on that same slide, regardless of department.

This creates a clean language for stakeholders, defining who is responsible for which objectives and KRs. The nice thing about well-defined KRs is that they naturally include both your primary metrics and your countermetrics. In product orgs, I prefer teams to focus on one objective, using key results as guardrails to avoid conflicting priorities.

Second is execution. The business mindset will tell you which personas or customer segments to solve for. Should you target low CAC, low ARPU customers or high ARPU, but high CAC ones? Are the marketing and product teams aligned on this?

I have an example. Let's say a home renovation marketplace onboarding process asks 20 questions that customers must answer about their home. But assume there’s a significant drop-off in that onboarding flow because of these 20 questions. A PM proposes integrating with Redfin to directly pull in a lot of the details, completely getting rid of the 20 questions and increasing our onboarding conversion by X percent. But saying "X percent increase" isn’t enough — you need to translate that to business impact, like 5,000 more qualified customers/month, driving $Y million in incremental monthly GMV or margin. Now that’s a business metric your stakeholders will care about at every level.

This dual-outcome language helps with quicker decision-making and alignment, which then helps with execution.

Third is ownership mindset. I actually share the team's burn rate with senior leads. Startups do this naturally, but many product teams optimize by time or effort, which is abstract. Knowing the team cost changes how they think about prioritization and resources because they now feel a sense of ownership. That's one tactic I've adopted to help teams be more business-leaning and have that startup mindset.

Aligning teams through clear goals and metrics

As a product leader, how do you coach PMs to focus on business outcomes and connect features to potential revenue impact and financial KPIs?

A lot of it is about transparency. I mentioned burn rate earlier, but another key piece is making business performance data accessible and understandable. Many goal-oriented companies have rituals for reviewing performance, but it’s up to leaders to make that information transparent across the org and to take on the responsibility of coaching teams through what those numbers actually mean.

One ritual I have is a regular product leads meeting where I share our latest exec MBR deck with the team. I walk the team through how the business is doing, what’s working, what isn’t, which levers we’ve pulled, and which delivered results as expected or not. That context and education really help shift the mindset from “we shipped a feature” to “what’s the impact behind that feature?”

Do you find that's well received by team members? Are they surprised to be focusing on that type of conversation?

It’s not right for every team, but as people grow more senior, they tend to have that appreciation for the business side of things. For the more junior folks, it becomes a good learning environment to start building that mindset. It also depends on the type of team. Growth teams probably need to care about business outcomes more than platform or feature teams. That distinction helps set expectations.

There are also two simple, tactical things I've adopted. First, I’ve made small edits to our PRD templates. One is adding a clear “from-to” section, either visual or written, so teams describe the current state and where they’re aiming to go. Second, I ask teams to specify which business key result they’re trying to impact, and by how much. That one row alone elevates the conversation beyond just shipping a feature to actually thinking about business outcomes.

And of course, the biweekly product leads ritual we discussed earlier helps reinforce that thinking, too. Even when helping other teams build customer empathy, that “from–to” framing forces clarity on what the change actually means for the user.

While you were at Policygenius, you helped lead the company to profitability for the first time in 10 years. From your perspective, what were the key product decisions or frameworks that moved the needle most?

A few things come to mind. I can't go into too much detail since some of it’s still not public, and also I want to acknowledge that it was definitely a team effort. I had strong collaborators on the marketing and sales side. And Policygenius is a very data-driven company. We not only ran MBRs with the exec team but also WBRs internally to stay aligned.

The biggest shift came from rethinking which metrics we were optimizing as a business. Over the years, we’d gotten very good at improving funnel-specific conversions, LTV, and CAC. But the biggest swings came when we looked at the same P&L through a different set of metrics. Different teams were interpreting shared metrics in different ways. Even if we were all chasing the same business outcome, we were starting from different insights or assumptions, which led to divergent strategies.

By reframing our core metrics and aligning on what really moved the needle for profitability, we were able to take bolder, more coordinated swings across the org. One framework that helped was identifying win-win situations across functions. Redefining how we approached key metrics helped unlock alignment and bigger impact. Instead of just continuing to optimize known paths, we found new levers to pull — ones that hadn’t been explored before because the old ones were already maximized.

Turning customer voices into action

How do user experience insights fit into your business-leaning approach? Can you share some best practices for keeping the customer in mind while still bringing everything back to the business?

I view business levers as the guardrails that help define which user problems are most important to solve. User research and deep insights are how teams build empathy with customers, and that empathy sharpens their intuition and judgment, which then results in better product quality.

So user insights aren’t separate from business. They’re the foundation for making better decisions more often. When teams understand what the customer really needs and where the business has the right to win, they can focus on the right problems and pull the right levers.

We also talked about dual-outcome framing. For any hypothesis or initiative, if you can clearly frame both the customer benefit and the business impact, you create more win-win situations, and your stakeholders will love you for it.

What's your approach to structuring customer advisory boards so they elicit deep insights without turning into echo chambers or feature request factories?

When I did my startup, I really came to appreciate customer advisory boards. They’re commonly used in enterprise settings, but they’re just as valuable in customer settings, too.

In enterprise, one best practice I’ve used is adding customers directly into your Slack environment. No separation, and maybe even a shared channel where multiple customers can interact. That way, they’re not just talking to you, they’re learning from each other too. When your customers win, you win. For consumer products, the same thing can happen in a Discord server. Your core users are often happy to engage and help.

Consumer advisory boards give your team a risk-free space to share work early and get feedback quickly. It helps shorten the feedback loop and lowers the formality of the process. Customers don’t feel like they’re being interviewed or judged. They feel like part of your team, which makes their input more honest and valuable.

But you do have to run the board like a first-class product. If you don’t, it risks becoming a list of feature or solution requests. Your most passionate customers will know your product well, so they'll always have specific asks. The key is to understand the underlying problems behind those asks, not just take the solution at face value.

What are some best practices for running these advisory boards and leveraging customer feedback effectively?

One thing I’ve found helpful is being transparent about your roadmap. Why is your roadmap the way it looks? Why are things prioritized? And not just that. Why is something not prioritized? That’s often even more important. Give customers a list of 10 potential priorities and ask them how they’d spend $100 across those items. It gives you insight into perceived value beyond a simple stack rank. If one customer puts all $100 on one thing, you know that’s what really matters to them.

The final, and maybe most important, step is to share the insights back with your team. Customer empathy shouldn’t just live in product. Record these interviews, use AI to summarize them, and share the full recordings internally if team members want to go deeper. Just make sure customers are aware it’ll be used internally. I've seen teams gatekeep that access, and it only limits the organization’s collective understanding.

When you do all of this right, customers start to see you as the industry connector. You're not just building a product, you’re moving the industry forward with it. And the best sign that your advisory board is working? When those customers start advocating for your product to others who aren’t even on the board. That’s when you know it’s really adding value.

Engineering customer advocacy platforms as growth vectors

From your perspective, what’s the best way to monitor and manage environments where customers are empowered to connect with each other?

I think a good rule of thumb is that 20 percent of your job should be talking to customers. That’s not a side task; it’s part of the job. And it becomes much more manageable when you focus on your core user segment. These are the people you’ll learn the most from and who will learn the most from each other. Ideally, that segment should be representative of the business priorities and the users you're building for.

There are plenty of tools that help manage inbound feedback — things like surfacing duplicate requests or organizing inputs into themes. I use one myself. But even if you don’t have a fancy system, as long as you’re dedicating that time and staying focused on the right customers, it works.

It’s important to keep those spaces from becoming feature request firehoses, because that definitely happens. If it gets to the point where customers are just throwing out solutions, you’ve probably already lost control of the dynamic. Most people naturally jump to suggesting solutions rather than articulating their actual problems.

My tactical fix for that is to ask for both the problem and the solution. A lot of teams just say, "Oh, my user research template will focus on the problem." But customers will default to describing the solution anyway. If you give them the space to share both, you usually get better insight into the underlying issue. And more often than not, solving the problem doesn’t require building their exact idea. It just needs to address the root cause.

Once you’ve gathered insights from a customer advisory board, what’s your process for translating that information into prioritized product investments that align with long-term business strategy — not just short-term customer satisfaction?

I'll give an example. At my start-up, we were building hybrid workplace solutions right as companies were figuring out how to bring people back into the office. One of the most common requests we got was, “Can you build a mobile or web app so employees can reserve desks?”

But our long-term strategy was to be highly employee-centric. And the reality is, no employee wants another tool just to book a desk. So while our buyers were asking for a booking app, what we heard, especially through our CAB, was a deeper problem. When employees come in, they want to be seated with the people they’re collaborating with that day.

That was the actual need. And when we dug into it, we realized the answer was already in tools like Slack and Google Calendar. Slack groups are often formed around specific projects or initiatives. So if you’re coming in for a brainstorm or to work on something with your team, that group already tells us who you're collaborating with. Same thing with calendar invites.

So instead of just building another desk booking app, we integrated with Slack and Calendar to help employees auto-book seats near people they were already working with. Sure, we had a web experience if someone wanted it. But the best experience, which aligned with our long-term strategy, was meeting employees where they already were. It solved the short-term ask while staying true to the bigger vision.