The Louvain-la-Neuve edition of PR_D_CT DAY 2025 proved one thing: Belgium’s product scene is evolving fast. The conversations have moved past the superficial adoption of frameworks and tools, with a new focus on deep, strategic work at the intersection of organisational trust, human behavior, and high-impact strategy.
We heard real-world experience around building products and teams, the gaps between best practices and what happens in reality.
These shifts in mindset and daily practice represent the four essential signals that product leaders must integrate to achieve sustainable operational maturity.
1. Struggling to prioritise is a strategy problem, not a scoring one
Struggling with prioritisation often signals an unclear or absent underlying strategy. For too long, product teams have relied heavily on quantitative scoring frameworks like MoSCoW or RICE. Without a clear strategy, however, these frameworks turn prioritisation into a fire-fighting mode "sorting exercise" of incoming requests, rather than a strategic decision-making process. The result is often a bloated backlog, dominated by the demands of the "loudest voice," reducing the team to mere order-takers.
In contrast, a clear strategy empowers the team to proactively identify and solve user problems that directly align with strategic goals. When strategy is undefined, focusing on numerical scores distracts from the main objective: understanding the root problems that need solving.
Product leaders must be bold, recognising their role is not simply to execute a plan, but to ensure the company has the right plan. Strategy must be defined as a set of choices (problems to solve) that connect the company’s mission to measurable impact. It is the product manager’s responsibility to actively seek why those problems deserve to be solved, as the answers rarely appear magically. This proactive approach means filtering out ideas that do not contribute to the strategy. With fewer ideas and assumptions to validate, proper research can focus on uncovering the root causes of user problems.
Once these root causes are discovered, prioritisation can shift away from effort estimation and focus instead on desired product outcomes and their contribution to the overarching goal. When strategy shows the direction, clarity increases, helping the product team reduce ambiguity and enforce alignment across the organisation.
The takeaway: As we love to say, "You don’t have a prioritisation problem, you have a strategy problem". Prioritisation yields meaningful results only when a robust strategy guides the choices, and scoring frameworks are in place to measure execution.
2. Shifting focus from activity tracking to observable behavior change
Product teams frequently track activity, but this often fails to result in sustained success or accountability. A phenomenon known as Goodhart's Law refers to the inherent danger of metrics becoming targets and thus being manipulated (sometimes unintentionally).
This manipulation often occurs when teams default to measuring what is easy to measure, even if that data is irrelevant to the true business outcome or, worse, has a negative impact. This problem is amplified when a metric is central to decision-making or tied to rewards.
However, metrics are undeniably necessary: they shape opinion, give direction, confirm if success is achieved, and on a day-to-day basis, enable experimentation and improvement.
The most effective teams are shifting their focus from using metrics as mere reporting tools to using them to make an intended behavior change observable. This requires asking four foundational questions first:
- Whose behavior do we intend to change?
- Which behavior change do we want to observe to know we've achieved our business goal?
- How do we measure this?
- What is the target that indicates to us that the behavior has effectively changed?
Only then can you start ideating on solutions on how to influence the chosen metric.
This "behavior-change first, metrics second" approach ensures the measurement is “outcome-first” and success is defined through behavior change. This helps the teams stay sharp on the intent of a metric.
The takeaway: Start defining success through behavior-change instead of metrics alone.
3. Discovery should be a collaborative effort across teams and functions
Discovery continues to be a major priority, yet many organisations struggle as it is siloed, often remaining solely the Product Manager's task or happening too late in the cycle.
The signal for 2026 is that discovery must be a shared, cross-functional and cross-team responsibility involving Product, Sales, Engineering, and Design from day one. Before, discovery was "split": Product was learning from users, while Sales was learning from buyers.
For B2B organisations, involving sales early in the discovery process is key. This moves the sales team from providing scope creep feedback to collaboratively framing opportunities and collecting structured insights. True discovery aligns what the user loves with what the buyer buys.
The product team focuses on the user: their workflow, needs, and what makes the experience seamless. Conversely, the sales team focuses on the buyer: what drives their decisions, builds trust, and proves impact. By connecting the user's needs with the buyer's goals, one can merge these two separate conversations into a single, unified narrative.
Some have even gone one step further, leveraging this situation to sell the discovery itself as an early adopter program. This way, customers are invited to co-create but meanwhile get access early to a new product offering.
This pushes the product team to deliver fast, showing business impact while learning the market itself. As the feedback loop is kept tight, it creates a healthy sense of urgency and accountability across the whole organisation: product, engineering, sales all need to collaborate closely.
The takeaway: Discovery is more thorough when it involves aligning the user’s experience (Product) with the buyer’s motivation (Sales) from the start.
4. Product management must own the full lifecycle, starting with pricing
Product managers who focus exclusively on design, user stories, and delivery risk missing the crucial commercial side of their impact. The movement toward greater maturity requires that PMs become fluent in understanding how their products generate revenue. Product managers have more impact on pricing than they might think, as every product decision inherently either captures or destroys value.
More companies are starting to treat pricing and packaging as a core product competency. PMs must understand the company’s strategic goal, whether it is owning market share, maximizing profit margin, or focusing on Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), as this objective must guide the pricing strategy.
Product managers are collaborating with growth and finance teams to develop offers based on value, rather than cost. They’re experimenting with monetisation levers, segmenting by willingness to pay, and aligning packaging with actual customer needs.
This shift isn’t about becoming salespeople, it’s about owning the full product lifecycle. From roadmap to revenue, PMs who understand pricing dynamics are earning more influence inside the business.
We hear about how teams use pricing experiments to guide roadmap decisions, and how packaging strategy can shape feature development. This kind of fluency creates better products and stronger cross-functional trust.
The takeaway: Pricing isn’t just a business lever, it’s part of the product. PMs who own it will lead the strategy.
Final thoughts
If this edition of PR_D_CT DAY made anything clear, it’s that effective product management is rooted in practical application and navigating diverse, real-world scenarios, rather than strictly adhering to textbook theory. A good practice, like any craft, evolves over time. It gets better when you talk to peers, test ideas, rethink assumptions, and own your mistakes.
We saw a strong signal that the product community in Belgium is moving toward something deeper: shared standards, cross-company learning, and a culture of reflection that puts users and teams at the centre.
So whether you were in the room or just reading now, consider this an invitation to question more bravely, to measure more meaningfully, and to build not just faster, but better.
