Rigid-seeming finance rules — capex vs. opex treatment, project-based funding gates — are often more negotiable than product and engineering leaders assume. The rules make sense once you understand finance's own logic: they think in terms of assets and capital, not features. Approaching finance with empathy for that logic, rather than treating the rules as immovable bureaucracy, opens room to negotiate exceptions.
Much of the perceived rigidity in finance/product funding conflicts isn't the finance rules themselves — it's product people applying an overly binary "projects vs. products" framing to funding requests. Funding could instead be tailored to a product's specific lifecycle stage rather than forced into one of two fixed buckets, which reframes the conflict as a negotiation problem rather than a rule-rigidity problem.
For CFO audiences specifically, Cagan's key reframe is that Discovery (Product Discovery Process) should be understood as product development, not R&D — R&D framing invites treatment as speculative overhead. The exception is genuine multi-year research work, which is R&D in the ordinary sense.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust