If You Led Product at Airtable, What Would You Do Now?
A lot of the product leaders I work with ask me the same question: How do I actually develop executive-level product judgment?
The work I do with them often starts with learning how to read a business through the signals that are already available.
You do not need to be sitting in the executive meeting. You do not always need access to the internal financial model. There is an enormous amount you can learn from how a company is funded, what its investors expect, how it makes money, what its leadership says publicly, where it is investing, what it is cutting, and what is changing around it.
The goal is to stop looking at the company only through the product and start seeing the business that the product exists inside.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have seen a lot of discussion about Bending Spoons' proposed acquisition of Airtable. So I wanted to use it as a very specific case study.
Imagine that you are not commenting on the acquisition from the outside.
Imagine that you lead product at Airtable.
Your company has just agreed to be acquired.
What should you actually be thinking about? What changes for you? And what would an executive product leader do differently?
First, understand what actually changed
Bending Spoons announced on August 4 that it had entered into an agreement to acquire Airtable for $1.285 billion in enterprise value. Airtable had reached approximately $480 million in ARR by June 2026 and was still growing more than 20% year over year. The transaction is expected to close later this year, subject to approvals. Until then, the companies remain independent.
That matters because this is not simply a failing software company being rescued.
Airtable has substantial revenue, hundreds of thousands of customer organizations and a product deeply embedded in important business workflows.
It also comes from a very different capital environment.
Airtable was venture-backed. In December 2021, it raised $735 million in a Series F, bringing total funding to $1.36 billion and valuing the company at $11 billion pre-money. Its investors included XN, Franklin Templeton, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Silver Lake and T. Rowe Price.
That venture-backed model matters because the economic expectation is generally built around creating a much larger future enterprise and eventual liquidity for investors.
Now the ownership context is changing.
And product leaders need to understand the implications of that change.
Bending Spoons is not a traditional software buyer
This is where the case becomes particularly interesting.
Sometimes a company is acquired strategically by another software company. Salesforce buys a company because it strengthens Salesforce's platform. Adobe buys a company because it fills a portfolio gap. The acquired product may be integrated into a broader ecosystem.
Bending Spoons is different.
I would describe it as sitting somewhere between a private-equity-style capital allocator and a software operating company.
It acquires established digital businesses, transforms how they operate, expands earnings, and reinvests the cash generated into additional acquisitions. Bending Spoons says it intends to own and operate the businesses for the long term rather than acquire them specifically to resell them.
Its transformation model can be deep. The company explicitly describes reorganizing teams, overhauling technology, redesigning user interfaces, accelerating development, and changing marketing and monetization. AI is often part of both the product transformation and how the company operates.
So if you are a product leader inside Airtable, the important question is not simply:
Who acquired us?
It is:
What does this particular owner believe it can do with Airtable that Airtable could not or did not do on its own?
That is where executive-level product judgment starts.
Your first job is to reverse-engineer the acquisition thesis
If I were leading product at Airtable, this would be my first exercise.
Why is Bending Spoons willing to deploy $1.285 billion into this asset?What did it actually buy?
It bought ARR.
It bought a recognized brand.
It bought enterprise relationships.
It bought workflows that customers already depend on.
It bought distribution and a large installed base.
It bought technology.
And, crucially, it presumably bought an opportunity to make the entire asset more valuable under a different operating model.
Bending Spoons describes its own strategy as improving businesses through operational excellence, increasing earnings and then reinvesting those earnings into further acquisitions.
That immediately changes the questions a product leader should be asking.
Where does Airtable's most defensible revenue come from?
Which customer segments have the strongest retention and expansion?
Which workflows make Airtable difficult to replace?
Where is there unrealized pricing power?
Where is the company spending substantially more than the value being created?
Which technology investments could materially change operating costs?
Which product investments create growth, retention or margin improvement?
Those questions are not feature prioritization.
They are questions about the investment thesis behind the product.
Then re-underwrite the roadmap
One of the biggest mistakes a product organization can make in this situation is continue executing the existing roadmap because it was already approved.
The roadmap may still contain excellent ideas.
That is not the point.
The assumptions underneath those decisions have changed.
The previous product strategy was created under one ownership structure, one set of growth expectations, one capital model and one risk tolerance.
The new owner may optimize for something different.
So I would put every major strategic bet back through an investment review.
Which initiatives should be accelerated because they clearly strengthen the new value-creation thesis?
Which products or capabilities should be optimized because customers value them but their economics are poor?
Which must be protected because they underpin retention, enterprise trust or strategic accounts?
And which initiatives should simply stop consuming capital?
This is where executive product judgment becomes uncomfortable.
A capability can create real customer value and still be a poor investment.
A team can have executed exceptionally well and still be working on something the company should stop funding.
A roadmap can have been correct six months ago and be wrong today.
Product executives need to be able to separate the quality of past decisions from the quality of the next capital-allocation decision.
Know where the economics of your product actually live
If you were leading a part of Airtable, I would want you to understand the chain connecting:
Revenue → customer segment → workflow → capability → cost → retention or expansion.
Not simply feature usage.
Imagine two Airtable product leaders meeting the new leadership.
One says: “We own the collaboration experience. Here are the 14 major initiatives on our roadmap.”
The other says: “Our largest enterprise customers depend disproportionately on these three workflows. They contribute heavily to expansion and appear difficult to replace. These two capabilities consume significant engineering capacity but have limited evidence of affecting retention or monetization. If we had another 50 engineers, this is where I would invest them. If we had 50 fewer engineers, this is what I would stop.”
The second conversation is fundamentally different.
It is no longer a roadmap conversation.
It is a capital-allocation conversation.
That is what executive-level product judgment looks like.
Your own role is being re-underwritten too
This is the part people understandably do not like talking about.
When ownership changes, it is not only the strategy that gets reconsidered.
The organization does too.
Bending Spoons explicitly says that reorganizing teams is commonly part of its transformation model.
If you are a product leader in that environment, spending your energy trying to prove that your existing team, scope or roadmap must survive is probably the wrong strategy.
Instead, make yourself valuable to the problem the new owner needs to solve.
Understand the acquisition thesis.
Understand the economics of your area.
Know which customers and workflows must not be disrupted.
Know where the company is over-investing.
Know which investment you would stop.
Know where the next dollar of engineering capacity should go.
Know what risks the buyer may not understand yet.
Your value proposition becomes: I can help you make better decisions about this asset.
That is much stronger than: I know this product better than anyone else.
Airtable is only today's case
The reason I wanted to walk through this example is that the same thinking applies to many situations product leaders will encounter.
Your company gets acquired.
Private equity comes in.
A new funding round changes growth expectations.
The company starts preparing for an IPO.
Growth suddenly misses plan.
Margins deteriorate.
A new CEO arrives.
AI changes the economics of your category.
In every one of those situations, continuing to execute yesterday's product strategy can be one of the riskiest things you can do.
An executive product leader recognizes that the business context has changed and the product needs to be re-underwritten against the new reality.
What changed?
What does the company need now?
Where does the economic value actually live?
Which bets still deserve capital?
Which should be accelerated?
Which should be protected?
Which should stop?
And where should product and engineering capacity move next?
This type of strategic thinking is exactly what I teach product leaders in my Maven cohort, From PM to Product Executive.
We use real companies and real strategic situations to learn how to diagnose a business, understand its financial reality, make product investment decisions, allocate capital across strategic bets and defend those decisions at the executive level.
Because the goal is not to memorize more product frameworks.
It is to develop the judgment to look at a situation like Airtable and be able to answer the question executives will eventually ask you:
Given what has changed, what should we do now?
I will be opening the next cohort soon.
Until next time,
Elena Leonova