Every organization has procurement reviews.
Gates where product decisions get examined by people who understand supplier markets, cost drivers, and supply chain risk.
And product teams hate them.
Not universally. Not always. But enough that you can feel the resistance in how late the procurement team gets brought in. How incomplete the information is. How defensive the conversations become.
Ask a product manager why, and they’ll say something diplomatic: “Procurement slows things down” or “They don’t understand the technical requirements.”
That’s not it.
Procurement reviews are feared because they expose something product teams would rather keep implicit: the choices they’ve already made about what matters and what doesn’t.
The Pattern I See Repeatedly
I’ve been on both sides of these reviews.
As someone managing P&L and product portfolios, fighting to keep procurement out until the design was “solid enough.”
As the procurement person brought in late, looking at specifications that had already locked in suppliers, costs, and risks that no one wanted to discuss.
The discomfort is consistent.
Product teams present decisions as inevitable. “This is the technical requirement. This is what customers need. This is what the product must be.”
Then procurement asks questions that reframe those certainties as choices:
“Why this material instead of alternatives that cost 40% less?”
“Why a specification that requires sole-source suppliers?”
“Why components with 16-week lead times when 6-week alternatives exist?”
These aren’t hostile questions.
They’re questions about trade-offs that were made without acknowledging they were trade-offs at all.
And acknowledging trade-offs means defending priorities that might not survive scrutiny.
What Reviews Actually Expose
Here’s what procurement reviews reveal:
Product teams optimize for speed.
Time to market matters. Getting something launched before competitors. Hitting a deadline that leadership committed to.
So they choose suppliers they already know. Materials that don’t require testing. Specifications that engineering is comfortable with.
All reasonable choices.
Until procurement asks: “What did you give up for speed?”
Did you choose the supplier who could deliver fastest over the one who could deliver most reliably?
Did you lock in a sole-source relationship because qualifying alternatives would take three months?
Did you accept higher costs because negotiating would slow the schedule?
These are legitimate trade-offs.
But they’re trade-offs that look different when someone asks: “Was speed worth the risk and cost premium we’re now locked into?”
The Meeting Where I Saw It Clearly
I was brought into a product review three months into development.
Engineering had selected components. Suppliers were identified. Timelines were set.
My role was to “validate the procurement strategy.”
Translation: confirm that what had already been decided was workable.
I asked a simple question: “Why this sensor specification?”
Engineering: “It meets our performance requirements.”
“Yes, but there are three other sensors that also meet requirements. This one costs 60% more. Why this one?”
Silence.
Then: “This is the one we’ve used before. We know it works. We don’t have time to qualify alternatives.”
There it was.
Not a technical requirement. A choice.
A choice to pay 60% more to avoid qualification work. A legitimate choice, maybe even the right choice given their timeline pressure.
But it was a choice—and no one wanted to frame it that way.
Because once it’s framed as a choice, someone might ask: “Was that the right choice? Did we optimize for the right thing?”
What Product Teams Actually Fear
Product teams don’t fear procurement reviews because they think they made mistakes.
They fear them because reviews expose what they optimized for—and it might not align with what the organization thinks they should have optimized for.
Product optimized for: Getting to market faster than competitors.
Finance cares about: Gross margin that supports the business case.
Operations cares about: Supply chain resilience and multiple sourcing options.
Procurement cares about: Cost competitiveness and supplier risk.
None of these are wrong. They’re different optimization priorities.
The problem isn’t the priorities.
The problem is that product teams make decisions that lock in their priorities without explicitly stating what they’re trading off.
Then procurement reviews force those trade-offs into visibility.
“You optimized for speed. That’s why cost is high and we’re sole-sourced. Was that the right trade-off?”
Most product teams can’t answer that question confidently.
Not because they made bad decisions. Because they made decisions without clearly articulating what they were optimizing for and what they were giving up to get it.
What Managing Multi-Billion-Dollar Programs Taught Me
Leading procurement for major automotive programs, I saw this dynamic at scale.
Programs with hundreds of components. Thousands of specifications. Suppliers across three continents.
The smoothest programs were the ones where product and engineering were explicit about their optimization priorities from the beginning.
“We’re optimizing for qualification speed on this program because the customer timeline is compressed. We accept that means higher initial costs and supplier concentration. Here’s why that’s the right trade-off for this program.”
Procurement could work with that. We could optimize our strategy around those stated priorities.
The difficult programs were the ones where priorities were implicit.
Product made decisions. Procurement discovered the implications. Then we spent months in uncomfortable reviews trying to understand why choices were made the way they were—and whether they could still be changed.
The discomfort wasn’t about competence. It was about misaligned optimization.
Product had optimized for things they didn’t want to state explicitly. Because stating them explicitly would invite questions about whether those were the right things to optimize for.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Trade-offs
Every product decision is a trade-off.
Choose the high-performance component: higher cost, longer lead time, sole-source risk.
Choose the cost-effective alternative: slightly lower performance, faster delivery, multiple sourcing options.
Choose the supplier you know: faster qualification, higher cost, less competitive pressure.
Choose the new supplier: longer qualification, better cost, higher initial risk.
None of these choices are wrong.
But they’re choices—not inevitabilities.
And procurement reviews make that explicit.
They transform “this is what we need” into “this is what we chose, and here’s what we gave up to get it.”
That transformation is uncomfortable because it invites challenge.
“Was that the right trade-off? Did we optimize for the right thing? Could we have achieved the same outcome with different choices?”
Product teams resist these questions not because they don’t have answers.
They resist because having to defend their optimization priorities to people with different priorities is exhausting.
What Changes When Procurement Comes In Early
At my current employer, I’m part of the product development process from the very beginning.
Not reviewing decisions after they’re made. Helping shape them as they’re being made.
The dynamic is completely different.
When I’m in early design discussions, the conversation isn’t:
“Why did you choose this?”
It’s:
“What are we optimizing for, and what are the cost/risk/supplier implications of different approaches?”
Engineering says: “We need this performance level.”
I say: “Here are three ways to achieve it. This approach is fastest. This one is lowest cost. This one has the best supply chain resilience. What matters most for this program?”
That’s a design conversation, not a review.
No one feels defensive because nothing has been locked in yet. We’re jointly exploring the solution space, making trade-offs explicit before they become embedded in specifications.
When procurement reviews happen later in these programs, they’re not uncomfortable.
Because the choices we’re reviewing were made jointly. The trade-offs are documented. Everyone knows what was optimized for and why.
The Reframe
Here’s what took me years to understand:
Procurement reviews aren’t audits looking for mistakes.
They’re mirrors that show what you actually optimized for—as distinct from what you said you were optimizing for.
Product teams say they’re optimizing for customer value, cost competitiveness, and supply chain resilience.
Then they make decisions that optimize for:
- Speed to market
- Engineering familiarity
- Avoiding difficult conversations with current suppliers
- Minimizing short-term development effort
- Reducing personal risk by choosing known solutions
None of these are bad optimizations. They’re just different from what was claimed.
And procurement reviews expose that gap.
Not to shame anyone. But because someone in the organization needs to ask: “Is what we’re actually optimizing for aligned with what we should be optimizing for?”
What I Tell Product Teams Now
When I work with product teams who are resistant to early procurement involvement, I frame it differently:
“I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong. I’m here to help make your trade-offs explicit so you can defend them.”
You’re going to face questions eventually.
Finance will ask about cost. Operations will ask about supply risk. Leadership will ask about competitiveness.
Better to surface those questions while you still have design flexibility.
Not to change your decisions necessarily. But to ensure the decisions you’re making are defensible given the priorities that matter to the business.
If you’re optimizing for speed, say so explicitly. Quantify what that speed is worth. Show why the cost and risk premiums are justified.
If you’re optimizing for risk reduction through known suppliers, make that case. Demonstrate why the cost premium is worth the reliability benefit.
The fear goes away when trade-offs are explicit.
Because then procurement reviews become validation of stated priorities, not exposure of hidden ones.
What Reviews Reveal About Organizations
Here’s the deeper truth:
The discomfort around procurement reviews isn’t really about procurement.
It’s about organizational alignment—or lack thereof.
When product teams fear reviews, it usually means:
The organization hasn’t been clear about what matters most.
Different functions have different priorities but no mechanism to reconcile them.
Trade-offs are made implicitly because making them explicitly would force difficult conversations about strategy.
Procurement reviews expose all of this.
Not because procurement is adversarial. Because procurement asks questions about choices that reveal organizational misalignment.
“Why did we optimize for X when the strategy says Y matters most?”
That’s not a procurement question. That’s a strategy question.
But it surfaces during procurement reviews because that’s when choices become undeniable.
The Open Question
I’ve spent twenty years watching product teams navigate this dynamic.
The best ones don’t fear procurement reviews.
They use them.
They bring procurement in early. They make trade-offs explicit. They document what they’re optimizing for and why.
When reviews happen, there are no surprises. Just confirmation that decisions aligned with stated priorities.
The teams that struggle are the ones that treat procurement reviews as obstacles to avoid rather than opportunities to align.
They make choices in private and hope they won’t have to defend them in public.
But choices always become visible eventually.
The only question is whether they become visible when you still have flexibility to adjust them, or when you’re locked in and defending why they can’t be changed.
Product teams don’t fear procurement reviews because procurement might find mistakes.
They fear them because reviews transform implicit trade-offs into explicit ones.
And explicit trade-offs can be challenged.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
The discomfort of making trade-offs explicit early is nothing compared to the discomfort of defending implicit trade-offs late.
When someone asks “why did you make this choice?” three months into development, and you can say:
“We optimized for speed because the customer deadline was fixed. We accepted a 20% cost premium and sole-source risk. Leadership agreed that was the right trade-off given the strategic importance of this program.”
That’s defensible.
When you say: “This was the obvious technical solution and we didn’t really think about alternatives…”
That’s where the fear comes from.
Not from procurement.
From the realization that choices were made without acknowledging they were choices at all.
And once that’s visible, it’s hard to justify why it happened that way.