A contrast between how venture capital funds discovery and how corporate annual planning funds projects. VC funds discovery first: a seed round buys a company the room to find out if an idea works, and only follow-on funding is tied to results actually achieved. Corporate annual planning, by contrast, typically funds a whole project upfront, based on a pitch about projected revenue and ease of delivery — closer to what's dismissively called a 'dog and pony show' than to evidence-based funding.
The implication for a Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model) organization: push annual planning toward funding a discovery phase first, and only commit full project budgets once that discovery has produced real evidence — rather than approving whole projects on the strength of the pitch alone. This is one more argument for Placing Bets (Strategy-as-Bets Framing) and enforcing a WIP cap: unproven parallel projects are exactly what upfront project-model funding tends to produce.
Corporate annual planning funds whole projects upfront, before any evidence the problem is worth solving that way; venture funding instead funds discovery first (a seed round) and only funds further building based on what that discovery shows. Cagan estimates the corporate approach costs on the order of "literally a hundred times the price" of the VC-style discovery-first approach for the same eventual outcome.
Palace Hotels shifted project funding away from speculative, sales-skewed ROI business cases — where, per Anoir, 'the more stubborn person in the room' tended to win funding — toward outcome-oriented metrics, enabled by newly hired product, data/analytics, and engineering leadership. Data became a political tool as much as an analytical one: see Data as Political Trust-Builder (Myth-Busting) for how it was used to kill an internally popular but unresearched idea (a booking app).
Funding models drive behavior directly: funding discrete features keeps teams in a project mindset and blocks Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model) transformation, while funding durable teams against outcomes (see Predictive Indicators) is what actually enables it. This is the funding half of the Output-to-Outcomes Shift Triad — you cannot get outcome ownership from a team whose budget is still allocated feature-by-feature.
A specific funding mechanism for durable teams: finance allocates budget to a team against a quantified outcome or predictive indicator rather than against a named project or feature list, and a finance partner is assigned to trace that outcome back to P&L impact. This turns funding conversations from 'what are you building' into 'what will move, and how does that move money' — the finance partnership is what keeps Outcome-Based Roadmap Reframing honest rather than aspirational.