Organic growth is hard enough. But when your company's growth strategy involves acquiring other products, integrating their teams, and merging their tech stacks into a coherent whole, product leadership enters a different arena entirely. The playbook that works for building a single product from scratch does not apply when you are stitching together three, five, or ten acquired platforms into something that feels unified.

At Gathering #9, hosted at Dualoop in Brussels, Robrecht Vander Haeghen drew on his experience as Senior VP of Product Management at Regnology to walk through the realities of leading a product organization through a buy and build acquisition strategy. His talk covered the structural, cultural, and strategic challenges that arise when growth comes through M&A rather than organic development.

The insights he shared were not theoretical. They came from navigating real integrations where product teams with different cultures, different architectures, and different definitions of quality had to find common ground without losing what made each product valuable in the first place.

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Original Presentation Slides

Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.

The Integration Paradox: Unify Without Destroying

One of the central themes of Robrecht's talk was what he called the integration paradox. When you acquire a product, you buy it because it works. It has customers, revenue, and a team that understands the domain. The instinct is to integrate quickly: merge the tech stack, consolidate the teams, create a single roadmap. But moving too fast risks destroying exactly what you paid for.

The alternative is equally dangerous. If you leave acquired products running independently for too long, you end up with a portfolio of disconnected tools that cannot share data, cross-sell effectively, or present a unified experience to customers. The art is in finding the right pace and the right sequence of integration.

“You cannot rush integration. But you also cannot afford to delay it indefinitely. The skill is knowing which parts to unify on day one and which parts to leave alone for a year.”

- Robrecht Vander Haeghen

Product Leadership Across Acquired Teams

Robrecht emphasized that the hardest part of buy and build is not the technology. It is the people. Acquired teams arrive with their own product culture, their own rituals, and their own understanding of what good looks like. Imposing a single way of working across all teams immediately is a recipe for attrition. But having no shared standards creates chaos.

Establish shared product principles before shared processes. Teams can work differently if they agree on what matters.

Invest heavily in cross-team knowledge sharing. Acquired PMs need to understand the full portfolio, not just their corner.

Create a common language for prioritization. If one team uses RICE and another uses gut feeling, alignment meetings become translation exercises.

Protect the autonomy of acquired teams in the early months. Mandate outcomes, not methods.

The key insight was that product leadership in a buy and build context is fundamentally different from product leadership in a single-product company. The role shifts from directing a team to designing a system in which multiple teams can make good decisions independently while moving toward a shared vision.

From Multiple Roadmaps to a Portfolio Strategy

Every acquired product comes with its own roadmap, its own customer promises, and its own technical debt. One of the most practical parts of Robrecht's talk was his approach to converging these into a portfolio strategy without breaking commitments to existing customers.

infoThe 90-Day Assessment Framework

Robrecht outlined a structured approach: in the first 90 days after acquisition, assess each product across four dimensions. Customer overlap with the existing portfolio. Technical compatibility with the target architecture. Team capability and cultural fit. Revenue dependency on features that conflict with the unified vision. This assessment drives the integration sequencing.

He was candid about the mistakes he had seen. The most common one was trying to build a unified roadmap too early, before the acquiring team truly understood the acquired product's customers. The result is a roadmap that optimizes for the acquirer's worldview and alienates the acquired product's user base.

Practical Lessons for Product Leaders

Robrecht closed with a set of lessons that resonated well beyond the buy and build context. Many of the challenges he described, aligning teams with different cultures, converging roadmaps, balancing autonomy with coherence, are present in any scaling product organization.

check_circleTreat every acquisition as a product discovery exercise. You do not truly understand what you bought until you have spent time with the customers.

check_circleBuild integration teams that include people from both sides. One-directional integration breeds resentment.

check_circleAccept that some acquired products will need to be sunset. Not everything fits, and pretending it does wastes resources.

check_circleCommunicate the vision relentlessly. In times of organizational change, people need to hear the direction ten times more than you think.

Leading a Product Organization Through a Buy & Build Acquisition Strategy

Original Presentation Slides

The Integration Paradox: Unify Without Destroying

Product Leadership Across Acquired Teams

From Multiple Roadmaps to a Portfolio Strategy

infoThe 90-Day Assessment Framework

Practical Lessons for Product Leaders

This article is for Consortium members

Key Takeaways

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