Zero-Based Budgeting for Product Leaders: Align Roadmaps to ROI

Why finance has clarity and product still flies on gut

Not long ago I was speaking with a cross functional digital leader who had just taken on the biggest team of his career. His CIO had given him a clear mandate: zero based budgeting. Every dollar and every hour had to be mapped cleanly to measurable business outcomes.

On the finance side, that mandate made sense. They had models, workflows, and clear ownership. But once those expectations hit product and engineering, things got messy. Requests piled up. Roadmaps ballooned. Money and time moved, yet no one could say in a simple sentence what the business was getting back.

I have had this same conversation with hundreds of product and strategy leaders. Finance is moving to zero based budgeting, but product is still running on prioritizing a laundry list of features.

Zero-based budgeting without outcome visibility will stall

Zero based budgeting itself is not the issue. Done well, it can be a powerful way to realign cost structures with strategy and growth. Bain & Company has written about this in depth, showing how firms that treat budgeting as a full redesign, not just a cost cutting exercise, see stronger and more durable impact. You can find a good overview here: Betting on zero-based budgeting's trifecta.

The problem is that most organizations stop at the finance layer. They justify headcount, licenses, and vendor spend at a high level, but the digital portfolio underneath those numbers stays opaque. You still see the same patterns: long lists of initiatives, vague business cases, and technology teams asked to deliver more with less, without any real clarity on outcomes.

Zero based budgeting asks a fair question. If we had to re-justify every dollar from scratch, based on what it actually delivers, would we fund this again? For product and technology, you cannot answer that unless you can see the link from strategy to metrics to roadmaps to real results.

Outcome visibility: a GPS for your portfolio

At Iteright, our whole thesis is simple: turn every digital investment into measurable business growth. That starts with what I call outcome visibility.

Take a real example we used with a 25 year old fintech and hardware player. Like most companies at that scale, their goals sounded familiar: grow revenue, protect EBITDA, and drive cost savings. Useful, but not very actionable for a product team on Monday morning.

So we took it one level deeper and defined explicit product strategies, such as growing software and services revenue, enhancing regional product customization, and deepening partnerships with payment providers.

From there, we attached hard metrics. Merchant retention. Annual recurring revenue for software and services. Software enabled terminal penetration rate. For each metric, we set a target and a timeframe.

When you do this well, it starts to feel like a GPS for the entire organization. Everyone can see where you are trying to go, which dials define success, and whether you are moving closer or drifting away.

Initially, many teams track these metrics manually because the data sits scattered across systems like Salesforce, NetSuite, Pendo, and internal product analytics. That is fine as a starting point. Over time, you want those integrations in place so the GPS updates in real time, not once a quarter in a slide deck.

If you want to go deeper on what it actually means to track outcomes instead of output, I break that down further in this piece: Are we really tracking outcomes, or just activity.

Bring discipline to ideas before they hit Jira

Once you have a clear GPS, the next failure mode is obvious. Ideas flood in, and your team rushes straight to execution tools. Someone has a concept for a smart POS hardware pre configuration pipeline or a new merchant onboarding app, and within hours there are tickets in Jira.

Instead, you need a disciplined gate before anything becomes work. For PACS, we framed this as a simple FinTech Hardware Opportunity Analysis Framework. The label is not important. The discipline is.

• Which strategic goal does this idea support
• Which specific metric could it move, and by how much
• How confident are we in that estimate
• Which customer personas does it serve
• What alternatives already exist in the market
• What will it take to launch, sell, and support it

Notice what happens when you force this conversation. The team stops pitching features and starts articulating business impact. You might say, for example, that a configuration pipeline could increase software enabled terminal penetration by 10 percent, but your confidence is low because you lack data in a given region. That is fine. Iteright will surface a range, such as 2.5 to 10 percent, and highlight the uncertainty so leaders see both the upside and the risk.

We capture the financial picture the same way. Maybe the initiative will cost 60 million across hardware, software, and go to market, with a potential to drive 150 million in incremental revenue and savings. Now you are not just debating features, you are debating a portfolio of bets.

In the platform we aggregate this into an Iteright Score that reflects how well you have answered the hard questions and how confident you are in the assumptions. It gives leaders a fast signal on where the thinking is robust and where it is still hand waving.

Layer AI on top of that and you get leverage. Because the system understands your strategies, ideas, and existing evidence, you can ask it to draft a concise leadership report, a PRD for engineering, or to flag risks you might have missed, like data privacy concerns or integration complexity. It is not inventing strategy for you. It is making your thinking sharper and more complete.

Connect the roadmap to money, time, and impact

Once the ideas are validated, you still need to turn them into real work. This is where most organizations lose the plot. The business case lives in one place, the roadmap in another, and Jira in a third. No one can answer the basic question: what does this roadmap mean for the business.

We solve that by making projects and roadmaps an explicit continuation of the business case. Inside Iteright, you spin up projects directly from approved ideas, connect them to Jira or Azure DevOps, and map timelines and resourcing.

Now when you look at a 2026 roadmap that includes a smart POS configuration pipeline, a merchant onboarding app, and channel partner enablement, you also see:

• How many dollars and days you are investing in each item
• Which strategic goals each item supports
• Which business metrics each item is projected to move
• What the expected financial range is for each bet

This is where zero based budgeting becomes very real for product. In one example, we saw a portfolio where the team had allocated 729 days of effort to an initiative that was likely to destroy value, and only 665 days to a smart POS system with strong projected ROI. When you see that side by side, you cannot unsee it. The portfolio discussion changes immediately.

The ZBB literature talks about building decision packages that leaders can compare side by side. That is exactly what you need at the product and technology layer. If you want a solid overview of how finance teams approach that, Julio Martínez at Abacum has a good breakdown of zero based budgeting and other methods in his guide: A step-by-step guide to ZBB.

Close the loop with real results

All of this is still theater if you never compare projections to reality. The final piece of outcome visibility is measurement over time.

Because your metrics and targets were defined up front, you can now track, quarter over quarter, how initiatives are performing. Maybe you assumed terminal penetration would climb steadily but you sit at zero percent of your goal after six months. Maybe retention is only at 40 percent of target even though you burned a year of engineering capacity on a new onboarding experience.

Those are hard conversations. They are also exactly the conversations your SVP expects you to have if they are serious about zero based budgeting. And they are much easier when everyone agreed on the metrics and targets in advance.

Research from Bain and others has shown that ZBB often disappoints when it is treated as a one time cost cutting program instead of an ongoing operating discipline. The same is true here. You get the real benefits when outcome visibility and portfolio rationalization become a habit, not a yearly exercise.

If you want a crisp primer on the financial side of ZBB, including formulas and examples, this overview from BILL is a useful reference: Zero based budgeting explained.

What great leaders do differently

Across all of these conversations with product and strategy executives, a few patterns stand out. The leaders who thrive under a zero based budgeting mandate tend to:

• Treat product investments as a portfolio of bets, not a queue of requests
• Require a clear line of sight from initiatives to specific metrics and financial outcomes
• Embrace uncertainty early, then narrow the range as evidence comes in
• Ask for roadmaps that read like a P&L, not just a release calendar
• Use storytelling and context to align stakeholders, not just dashboards

If you are interested in how storytelling can shift the way your leadership team hears product updates, I dig into that here: Moving beyond execution with better product narratives.

And if you are wrestling with how to move from feature velocity to real business value, this piece may help: From velocity to value.

A question for your next leadership meeting

Close your eyes and imagine this scenario. Your CIO looks at you and says, show me how our 2026 roadmap ladders into revenue, EBITDA, and cost savings. Show me which ideas we should stop funding, where we should double down, and how confident you are in those calls.

Could you answer that cleanly on a single page?

That is the bar zero based budgeting is quietly setting for product and technology leaders. Outcome visibility is how you clear it.

If you want to see how we approach that at Iteright across different industries and portfolio structures, you can explore more of our thinking here: Iteright solutions overview and here: Navigating the product life cycle.