“The business wants it.”
There may be no stranger sentence in product management. It appears in planning meetings, roadmap reviews and conversations about why a team is building something nobody seems particularly enthusiastic about.
Everyone understands what the sentence is supposed to mean. Far fewer people can tell you who, specifically, “the business” is.
Sales? Finance? The executive team? Whoever has the most power in the room—or perhaps whoever isn’t in it?
The answer changes depending on where you work.
In an early-stage startup, “the business” might mean the founders, the runway or the handful of customers keeping the company alive. Product, technology and commercial decisions are tangled together because the same people are often making all three.
Here, “the business needs this” usually means: we believe this is necessary for survival. The urgency may be real. It can also make questioning the assumptions behind a decision look like obstruction.
In a scale-up, the phrase starts to mean something else. Sales, marketing, customer success and finance have become distinct functions, each with their own targets and leadership. Product and engineering have developed their own practices, language and claims to expertise.
“The business” becomes the commercial organisation on the other side of a newly constructed boundary. It asks for roadmap commitments, features for strategic accounts and opportunities that apparently cannot wait for the next planning cycle.
Inside a bank, insurer or other large financial-services company, the boundary can be more explicit. A product or technology team may serve an internal business unit that owns a customer segment, distribution channel, operational process or P&L.
Here, “the business” may be a formally recognised part of the operating model. It has representatives, budgets and decision rights. The product team, despite the name, can end up operating as an internal supplier.
The people change. The political function of the phrase rarely does.
What the phrase is doing
Calling a group “the business” grants its perspective a particular authority. Its requests become commercial reality. Its interpretation of customer needs becomes the voice of the customer. Its choices become constraints for product and technology to accommodate.
It also compresses a long chain of interpretation.
A customer says something to a relationship manager. The relationship manager reports it to a distribution leader. The distribution leader combines it with other conversations. A business representative turns it into a requirement. Eventually, a product team hears that “the customer wants this.”
Every step may be reasonable. But every step also involves somebody selecting, interpreting and reframing information. By the time the request arrives, an observation has hardened into a solution and an interpretation has acquired the authority of direct customer truth.
“The customer wants this” might actually mean:
- One customer explicitly requested it.
- Several customers described a similar problem.
- Sales believes it would help close a deal.
- A relationship manager inferred it from a conversation.
- A leader thinks the market expects it.
- The company wants to offer it and expects customers to respond.
These are all useful inputs. They are not equivalent forms of evidence.
The voice of the customer is not the same thing as the voice of the team closest to the customer.
Product teams are not innocent here either. Research and analytics do not give us pure access to customer truth. We decide which users to study, which behaviours matter and how findings should be interpreted.
No function has an uncontaminated claim to the customer.
Product is part of the business
“The business” also gives product people a convenient antagonist: commercially minded, short-term and forever interrupting the thoughtful work of discovery. Product, by contrast, gets to represent the user and the long term.
It’s a flattering story. It’s also an unhelpful one.
A product team is not adjacent to the business. It is one of the ways the business acts. Product people cannot demand a seat at the table while talking as if they are not in the building.
That doesn’t mean commercial demands should automatically prevail. Revenue targets do not eliminate the need for evidence. Executive authority does not turn an assumption into customer insight. Proximity to a client does not make a proposed solution correct.
It means we should name the disagreement properly.