Cambridge Product Management Network

Your roadmap is not the problem, your reviews are. How to build authority by avoiding four mistakes I made.

When stakeholder alignment breaks down, we blame the roadmap. But after mistakes across two companies, Cei learned the real problem is how we run product leadership reviews. This is a story-driven talk about what each mistake cost, the system he built from them, and why reviews, not roadmaps, are where authority gets built.

Product leadership reviews are the meetings where your work gets funded, deprioritised, or killed. They're not sprint reviews. They're not design reviews. They're decision forums where senior leaders test your product bets against money, time, and risk. Most product people
walk into them unprepared. This is not because they haven't done the product work, but because they don't understand what the meeting actually is, or don't know when they are in one.

In this session Cei will share how he learnt this the hard way: Four mistakes with real costs, each building on the last. He will share the system he’s built from these mistakes - decision documents, stakeholder pre-meetings, live decision logs, business translation. This is not a transformation story, it charts the slow accumulation of hard lessons over a number of years. Cei will leave us a real 2025 example where the system worked.

Speaker background
Cei Sanderson is VP of Products at Bango, where he leads product in fintech payments and subscriptions. He's spent nearly two decades building enterprise B2B products across six domains, from energy and financial crime prevention to the subscription economy. Cei believes product thinking, not domain expertise, is the transferable superpower. Cei coaches and mentors product people through the messy, nuanced reality of enterprise B2B, and writes about his messy journey to help raise the bar for product leadership.