Buy and build is one of the most popular growth strategies in European B2B software, yet the product management playbook for it barely exists. Companies like Wolters Kluwer, MobileXpense, and Regnology have grown by acquiring a long list of companies, each with its own product, team, codebase, and customer base. The assumption is that combining them creates something greater than the sum of its parts. The reality is far messier.

At Gathering #9, hosted at Dualoop in Brussels, Robrecht Vander Haeghen drew on his experience as Senior VP of Product Management at Regnology to lay out the five most common traps that product leaders fall into after acquisitions, and the five practical solutions he has developed to counteract them. Regnology itself is a product of serial acquisition, having absorbed BearingPoint, Vizor, Vermeg, b.fine, Fingo, Invoke, Khelix, and several more. Robrecht spoke from the trenches.

The Five Acquisition Traps

Five Solutions for Post-Acquisition Product Leadership

For each trap, Robrecht offered a concrete counter-strategy drawn from his experience at Regnology.

infoSolution 1: Sunset Products

Not every acquired product deserves to live forever. Sunsetting requires making a deliberate tradeoff between churn from discontinuing a product and the backlog burden of maintaining it. Robrecht's advice: start small in the number of customers you migrate but big in scope. Target your ideal customer profile and optimize the sunset path for those users first. Accepting some churn is better than keeping zombie products alive indefinitely.

infoSolution 2: Portfolio Management

Instead of a single unified roadmap, break the work across your portfolio into distinct categories: roadmap items, bugs, maintenance, and customer requests. Prioritize within each category rather than across them. This prevents strategic roadmap work from being perpetually crowded out by urgent customer requests, and it gives teams clarity about what kind of work they are doing and why.

infoSolution 3: Develop Integrated Staff

The people problem is real, but the solution is not to keep acquired teams siloed. Build mixed teams with multi-product expertise. Mix leadership teams across the legacy organizational boundaries. When people understand more than one product, they can make better tradeoff decisions and they stop defending their corner of the portfolio reflexively.

lightbulbSolution 4: Outcomes Over Outputs

Post-acquisition, teams tend to measure success by output: features shipped, integrations completed, migration milestones hit. Robrecht urged a shift toward outcomes and impact. Minimize output. Maximize outcomes in the form of happier users and impact in the form of a healthier business. This reframing helps teams focus on what actually matters rather than staying busy with integration busywork.

lightbulbSolution 5: Choose to Build on Few Products

Rather than spreading development across every acquired product, explicitly choose a small number of products to build on and direct investment there. Reducing complexity is essential because the market expects a response, and maintaining feature parity across many overlapping products is stifling. Fewer products, deeper investment, clearer direction.

Leading a Product Organization Through a Buy & Build Acquisition Strategy

The Five Acquisition Traps

Trap 1: It Looks the Same, Does the Same, So It Is the Same

Trap 2: Just Combine This With That

Trap 3: More People Means More Time for What Matters

Trap 4: The New Super Product

Trap 5: The Illusion of Neutrality

Five Solutions for Post-Acquisition Product Leadership

infoSolution 1: Sunset Products

infoSolution 2: Portfolio Management

infoSolution 3: Develop Integrated Staff

lightbulbSolution 4: Outcomes Over Outputs

lightbulbSolution 5: Choose to Build on Few Products

The Hard Truths of Buy and Build

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Key Takeaways

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