Where Product Growth Begins
Seeing What's Possible - and Leading Others There
You know the opportunity that's been lurking on the edge of your roadmap.
It's been sitting just out of reach — too big to ignore, too risky to grab without backup.
It’s the kind of opportunity that could change your product, company, or even career.
And yet... it’s easier for everyone to keep doing business as usual.
If you’re the one who sees what's possible, you’re also the one who has to lead others there.
Not with a grand reveal or a high-stakes pitch — but with small steps: building a case, answering concerns, managing risks.
This is how product managers drive real growth.
This article shows you how to develop a new opportunity in a way that inspires your leadership team to join you — and how to turn that first brave step into momentum.
Build a Quick Business Case (Before You Talk to Anyone Important)
Estimate the business opportunity. The business opportunity comes from a defined market, such as AI-automation for manufacturing or cloud computing. Using AI, you can break down the market into geographic coverage, business size, industry vertical, and deployment model. This provides a rough opportunity size and growth rate.
Then map the opportunity to your organization's customers when your product has this functionality. Estimate the number of customers that might need it. Size the spend of each potential customer. Calculate the rough business growth from the new opportunity.
If the business impact is too low, then consider more value points for the opportunity. For example:
Reduced customer churn
Pull through business from a complete solution
Expansions from existing customers
New customer logos
Next, estimate the rough effort sizing. Then you have the key elements for a business case. Keep a list of the assumptions as you go.
Related article: Business Fluency for Product Managers
Refine the Business Case Based on Common Objections
Executives have a first-level new business opportunity test. They look at these questions:
Is this opportunity big enough to matter?
How is this different from today's business?
Why now and not later?
You can review existing business and new opportunities under development to answer these questions.
Review the opportunity with trusted coworkers and your finance team for feedback. Tighten the business case and assumptions as you go. Be prepared for warnings about proceeding. Ask questions about the concerns and similar failures in the past.
Reconsider your positioning of the new opportunity. Think about your opening reasoning - is this incremental growth, taking a bet on an expansion, or future-proofing your solution?
Anticipate and Handle Executive Concerns
By this point, you have characterized the opportunity, drafted a business case, and you've decided how to position this opportunity. The opportunity is looking promising at the high level.
The next step is anticipating the executive concerns. Promising opportunities get financial scrutiny before going to executives. This is your chance to teach your finance team about the new opportunity and answer financial issues. Also, know that your finance team is checking your assumptions with engineering and others.
Concern 1: If this is important, why didn't customers or sales raise it?
This is your chance to show what has prompted this emerging insight. Some reasons for change as emerging insight:
Market conditions changed due to technology innovations or cost pressures
Competitive updates
Solution environment
Partnership opportunities
New customer segments opening from product initiatives
Keep your tone warm and responsive. These questions come from a need to understand what has changed and presented this opportunity.
Concern 2: We respond to customer needs. Why create something new?
Now you have a chance to recognize the team's hard work in responding to customer requests. Your team always cheerfully handles one-off customer requests.
You can position this opportunity as being proactive to capture the opportunity instead of reacting to the customer's demand. This lets the team lead, not follow.
You have data points to show that the reactive work in the past can be consolidated in a way that potential customers will find attractive. Additionally, the new opportunity can be marketed and lead to more growth.
Concern 3: Hidden Start-up costs are missing
Finance teams know product managers underestimate the time needed to launch new features. And there are revenue delays on new opportunities.
You can show that you have thought about launch and ramp-up costs as well as operational debt.
Prior feature projects give you good data on assumptions for your opportunity. Check on:
Effort to prepare your organization for a product change
Length of time for customers to accept a feature
Typical sales cycle for new customers
Be prepared to show your conservative estimates for the start-up costs.
Preparing Your Organization to See the Opportunity Differently
After taking the steps for the business case and addressing the financial concerns, you still have work to bring your opportunity to life. Any opportunity worth pursuing is going to have risks and unknowns.
However, no opportunity is an easy slam dunk. Real business growth is going to change the organization. Your business case shows what is possible.
To fully embrace the opportunity, your organization needs to see the path from today to the opportunity. Your ask to the organization is:
Confirm with you that there is an opportunity
Support small, starter projects to prove early traction
An experiment with feedback is easier to accommodate than organizational change and investment. This gives your organization time to rationalize the changes needed to go after the new opportunity.
Keeping Momentum: Working with Financial Leaders and Executives
The difference in this opportunity is that you treat it as a conversation with finance and leaders. You avoid a one-and-done pitch of your opportunity. You treat it like a campaign in which the leadership joins you for the early steps.
You build momentum with small wins. Starting with confirmation of the opportunity, followed by proof points and early metrics. When the opportunity becomes real, then executives are prepared to organize for success.
The finance team and executives can be your biggest allies in making the opportunity real. As your allies, you can keep the conversation going as you progress and manage the risks.
A quick way explain a new growth opportunity is to discuss it with AI. Here are the prompts I use to refine an opportunity with AI (Paid Subscribers only).
Conclusion - Making the Opportunity Real
Every great opportunity starts as a question mark — a glimmer of what could be, hidden inside the noise of what already is.
It’s easy to wait for perfect clarity or overwhelming demand.
It’s much harder — and far more powerful — to lead others toward a future they can’t see yet.
By building a thoughtful business case, listening to concerns, and guiding your organization through early steps, you don’t just chase growth — you create it.
You show your team, your leaders, and your company what's possible when someone dares to believe a little sooner than everyone else.
In the end, it’s not just about launching a new opportunity.
It’s about becoming the kind of product leader who knows how.
Last week’s backstory for paid subscribers was about getting your product team involved in risk management. Did the Product Team Take on Shipping Readiness?
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Ok, but where is validation?
The bulk of the story covers how to work around the corporate hierarchy. That's an important aspect of getting the work done in *some* contexts. Even if it's just additional tax for ineffectively managed organization (but that's another story).
But even sticking to the context and accepting the reality: the whole train of thought guess with an assumption that we got the idea right.
Which is unlikely.
And if we didn't the whole effort (if successful) would lead to a bad product investment.
Now changing the process to include early and frequent validation it both improves the chances of building something that would work *and* gives fodder to navigate corporate politics.