Your Product Org Needs a Rosetta Stone
Great communication is the difference between shipping features and delivering outcomes.
Recently at the British Museum in London, I finally came face-to-face with the Rosetta Stone. For years, I’ve used it as an analogy to help clients see the importance of clear communications in executing corporate visions. Seeing it in person made the lesson even clearer, and made me realize that the analogy had been missing a key callout: the critical importance of product managers as the connective tissue between vision and execution.
The Rosetta Stone as a Two-Way Translation
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient slab of granite inscribed with the same royal decree in three scripts: ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic (the everyday Egyptian script), and ancient Greek. The author was a council of priests for Ptolemy V Epiphanes. When it was rediscovered in 1799, archeologists could finally unlock the meaning of hieroglyphs, and it was a breakthrough in understanding a lost language.
Even the Pharaoh's management team understood the importance of customizing a single message for multiple audiences.
Now think about your own management's communication practices: does your company adapt executive messaging for different groups, or is it a one-message-fits-all culture?
If it's the latter, how's that working for you?
2 Paths and 1 Outcome
Applying the Rosetta Stone analogy to the Product Organization requires 2 fundamental communication flows:
Top-down: Executive visions must cascade clearly into product goals, roadmaps, and engineering backlogs.
Bottom-up: Customer voices must be faithfully translated upward so that executive vision stays grounded in real needs and opportunities.
Product managers sit at the center of this translation, ensuring that both scripts — the executive vision and the customer’s voice — align into one coherent decree.
The Risk of One-Sided Translation
When only one of these paths is prioritized, organizations stumble.
Vision without customer alignment produces lofty strategies disconnected from what customers actually want.
Customer focus without strategic alignment leads to feature creep and a scattered portfolio.
Without both scripts, the message is incomplete — and the product organization risks speaking a language no one understands.
From Vision and Customer Needs to Product Strategy
Each layer of the company must have an aligned "script."
Executives: Define the aspirational direction.
Customers: Surface pain points, wants, and behaviors.
Product Management: Map company aspirations with customer requirements.
Program & Engineering: Deliver features and releases that embody both the vision and customer obsession.
The Takeaway
Like the Rosetta Stone, great communication ensures that one vision is understood in every language. In product organizations, product managers are the translators — and that clarity is the difference between shipping features and delivering products customers love.”