From Insight to Impact: Business Analysis for Product Leaders

A Series.

This series explores how business analysis generates insights for product leaders, guiding smart product decisions. It covers topics such as market analysis, assessing internal strengths, and translating insights into actionable strategies for product development, monetization, and risk management. The series also discusses potential pivots for underperforming products and strategies for regaining trust after crises.

Diving deep to get Insights...

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A practical series on turning insight to impact, helping create an actionable product strategy.

Great products don’t start with features — they start with clarity. Clarity about the market, the opportunity, and the business they serve. This series explores how business analysis generates insights for product leaders, who can in turn translate them into impact. Business analysis drives smart product decisions: from identifying market gaps to shaping value propositions, and translating strategy into features, customer relationships, and business models.

Each post in this collection tackles a critical step in that process. It starts with mapping the terrain — market size, growth potential, competitive saturation, unmet needs — and continues with assessing internal strengths: team capabilities, technical leverage, and delivery capacity. Together, these inputs guide what to build, why it matters, and how it supports sustainable business outcomes.

These techniques don’t just apply to new products. When an existing product underperforms, they help uncover what’s misaligned — the market, the message, the mechanics — and chart a path toward improvement or pivot.

Investors use the same lens to assess product potential in their portfolio or target companies. What’s working? What’s missing? And what would it take to unlock value faster or more effectively?

This series explores this approach down: real-world techniques for translating insight into impact, analysis into action, and ambiguity into informed decisions. Whether defining strategy, evaluating a roadmap, or rethinking product-market fit, this is the thinking behind the build.

Enjoy the ride!

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Table of Contents

I Going Global - Product Due Diligence

A private equity firm commissioned a product due diligence analysis ahead of a potential investment in a local loyalty solution provider. The goal was to evaluate the technology’s global expansion potential by examining market trends, the existing value proposition, and the scalability of both the tech and operating model.

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II Are there more opportunities for advertising monetization for Waze?

Waze, acquired by Google ten years ago, still struggles to find a viable business model - despite its popularity. While advertising is a primary revenue source, the current model, relying on geo-targeted ads, lacks segmentation and attribution. The author suggests improving monetization by segmenting users based on behavior and intent, implementing result-based monetization strategies like CPS, and leveraging Google Ads technology for better attribution.

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III Is LinkedIn Beyond Hope as a Content Platform?

LinkedIn, originally designed for professional networking and knowledge sharing, has evolved into a content platform. The content quality of its feed, however, is compromised by a high volume of low-value posts, or “noise,” impacting user experience and marketing efficiency.

To address this, LinkedIn should consider implementing a quota on free posts and charging for additional ones, akin to trade publications, to reduce noise and increase the visibility of high-value content.

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IV Could PLG Regain Trust after crisis?

Google’s Gemini AI, following a trust-eroding debacle, could regain trust through a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy. This strategy involves training Gemini on Google Workspace’s help and support content, offering it to users for free, and using this interaction to demonstrate Gemini’s value and regain trust. The success of this strategy hinges on the quality of the Gemini-powered help feature and its ability to address user needs effectively.

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V "To BNPL or not to BNPL" - The question of BNPL risk management

BNPL, or “Buy Now, Pay Later,” is a consumer financing scheme that splits the price of a good into several payments. While BNPL has seen significant traction, with transaction volume in the US skyrocketing, its viability as a lending strategy is uncertain. A probabilistic model shows that the risk of loss for BNPL lenders is 100%, highlighting the need for careful risk management, especially in the current economic climate with rising interest rates and inflation.

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VI Reviving iRobot: Build a marketplace around your product

iRobot, the pioneer of robotic mopping, faces financial struggle due to competition. Amazon's failed acquisition left it short in cash. What if the way out of the downward spiral was in building a marketplace around iRobot-Home its control app, offering a range of home maintenance services and generating additional revenue streams?

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VII Wix: Towards a change in Strategy?

Investors’ response to Wix’s financial outlook, citing 5% free cash flow in ’22 and 10% in ’23, suggests a shift in focus towards profitability. This shift may involve extracting more value from the current user base, increasing revenue retention, and exploring new value-added services.