The Real Impact of Mergers & Acquisitions on Your Product Team

Tasha Melchior walks on stage with the kind of calm you only get after you have lived it enough times that you stop counting. Seven acquisitions. One major merger. A company story that keeps rewriting itself, while the product team is still expected to ship, keep customers happy, and somehow feel “aligned.”

The Board Game Version of M&A Is the Fun Part

Tasha introduces herself as VP of Product at Everway, and she makes a point of sharing her non-traditional path. She was a history teacher before she moved into software and product, and she has worked across industries before circling back into EdTech. She is also the UXDX Ambassador in Copenhagen, which explains the energy she brings when she invites people to come speak at meetups.

Then she shares a personal detail that turns into a metaphor for the entire talk. She loves board games. Especially one called Acquire, a game where you invest in companies, grow them, and watch them swallow each other through mergers and acquisitions.

The game captures the excitement of M&A, the strategic wins, and the feeling of being on the right side of a deal. But, Tasha says, the real-world version has far more friction than the board game box ever mentions. When M&A happen to your company, your product team does not experience it as a clean transaction.

It feels like the rules changed mid-play.

Everway, A Mission That Makes the Chaos Worth It

Before Tasha gets into the messy part, she grounds the room in what Everway actually does. The company was formed through the merger of Texthelp and n2y, two similarly sized organizations of roughly 300 employees each, now combined into a team of around 600.

Everway builds software that helps people understand and be understood. The scale is bigger than many people realize. Products delivered to over 250 million people across around 150 countries, supported by teams spread across 10 global offices. Tasha is based in Copenhagen, and her own product team spans Scandinavia, the UK, the US, and even Melbourne. Scheduling alone is a weekly puzzle.

The mission is rooted in a belief that every mind is unique. Traditional one-size-fits-all learning and work systems leave people behind, especially neurodiverse learners. Tasha explains that many learning differences still carry stigma, even though people who are neurodiverse often develop strengths that neurotypical systems fail to recognize.

Everway’s expanded strategy reflects something Tasha sees as obvious once you say it out loud. Students grow up. They leave school. They reach university and work and lose support. The company now frames its approach as “k to gray,” kindergarten until you turn gray, supporting people across life stages, not only in classrooms.

She offers a metaphor that makes the mission feel tangible. Assistive tools should become like eyeglasses. Once bulky, stigmatized, and only for people who truly needed them. Now normal, stylish, and even worn by people who just like how they look. That is the future she wants for learning and communication support. Necessary for some, useful for all.

The Holy Trinity That M&A Loves to Disrupt

Now Tasha pivots to the behind-the-scenes story. She frames her leadership lens as three areas she constantly monitors: people, product, and process.

For people and culture, she watches for empowerment, clarity, and whether the environment helps the team thrive.

For the product, she watches strategy clarity, alignment, and whether what the team builds will truly be “hired” by users to get their jobs done.

For the process, she is unapologetically enthusiastic. She believes repeatable, measurable, scalable processes are what enable teams to deliver reliably. She borrows a line from her CEO, Craig. Process is like the frame of a bicycle. If the frame is broken, you can pedal as fast as you want and still go in the wrong direction.

Then she asks the question that shapes the rest of the talk. What happens to people, products, and processes when you throw mergers and acquisitions into the mix?

The Scale Tips, and Everyone Storms

Tasha uses an analogy that is almost uncomfortably accurate. A friend once told her that a family is like a scale, more or less balanced. When a new member joins, the scale tips and everyone loses their footing. It takes about a year to rebalance.

In Tasha’s experience, every acquisition is like adding a new family member. The scale tips. The team enters the storming phase, the part of Tuckman’s model that no one romanticizes. Suddenly, there are new colleagues, new identities, new ways of working, and often a new story about what “good” looks like.

Tasha shares an example from outside Everway that still maps perfectly. A CTO friend described a merger that looked like a perfect match at first because the values sounded aligned. Then reality arrived. Differences in culture and process surfaced fast.

Everway has seen similar tension, amplified by the fact that some acquired companies had competed with each other for years. People had built their professional identity on saying, loudly, why the other product was worse. Then, overnight, those people become colleagues, under a new brand name, expected to collaborate as if the past did not exist.

Tasha does not sugarcoat it. Change requires emotional agility, not just skill. It asks people to unlearn, let go of comfort, and operate without the steady waters they are used to navigating.

The Product Portfolio Problem Nobody Can Ignore

M&A create a growing product suite, and Tasha shows how quickly that becomes unsustainable. Each product is tied to revenue. Each has loyal users. Each has customers who do not want to hear the word “sunset.”

But sales teams cannot sell a sprawling set of overlapping tools forever. Brand consistency, UI consistency, and a cohesive suite become essential, and none of that happens automatically.

Tasha gives a concrete example through literacy toolbars. Everway’s Read and Write toolbar supports diverse and multilingual learners, with features like read aloud, screen masking, dictionaries, and word prediction across platforms.

When Everway acquired Don Johnston in the US, those products included CoWriter and Snap and Read. The decision was to transition customers into Read and Write, but to do it without making users feel like they had been dumped into a foreign interface. That meant integrating features and even underlying language engines into the core product, and redesigning the experience so users could move smoothly between different display modes.

The end goal is not only feature parity. It is consolidation, sunsetting products carefully while protecting trust.

In Sweden, the approach differed. Three acquired companies had been selling three different literacy toolbars. Instead of choosing a winner, Everway built a new “super product,” designed with Scandinavian minimalism and simplicity in mind. Since launching in May last year, active usage has grown significantly, and feedback has been strong.

Tasha’s underlying lesson is that consolidation is not a single decision. It is a long sequence of design, technical, and change management choices, all made while the team is still responsible for keeping the current customers happy.

When Your Best Process Gets Replaced

Process is where Tasha’s story becomes painfully relatable. Before the merger, her team had built a roadmap process that stakeholders loved. Simple, clear, and scalable.

They kept all product roadmaps in a single slide deck. For each product, the PM maintained four key views: deliveries from the past six months, the next two quarters, an annual timeline, and a top ten ideas list. The roadmap used a now-next-later structure and included an out-of-scope frame so stakeholders could see what was truly shipping versus what was being worked on.

Each item is linked to a one-page “hero slide” that explains the what and why, how success would be measured, and is linked to marketing materials and relevant UI imagery. Sales and customer success used these slides with customers. Engineers used the deck for context. Leadership lived in it.

Then the merger happened. New CEO. New CPO. New preferences. New way of working.

The company moved to Productboard. Tasha admits she resisted. Her thinking was simple: if it is not broken, do not fix it. But she also acknowledges the reality. Standardizing processes across a bigger org matters, and new leaders need a system that scales for them too.

The point is not that Productboard is good or bad. The point is that M&A often replace a working process with a different one, and even process people like Tasha still have to move through resistance before acceptance.

The Real Requirement Is Emotional Agility

Tasha names the concept she wants people to take away. Mergers and acquisitions require not only agile development, but emotional agility.

There is friction. Personality differences. Silos. Sometimes chaos. Sometimes loss of expertise because not everyone stays through the transition. It can feel like an emotional rollercoaster.

To cope, she uses an emotions wheel. Identify what you are feeling. Accept it. Do not judge it or fight it. Then step back, lift yourself out of the fog, and choose actions that align with your values.

Her closing takeaway is honest. It is messy. It is hard. It is also exciting, and it teaches you constantly. Over time, balance returns. And even though the scale will tip again with future deals, resilience grows in the process.

If your product team is in the middle of an acquisition right now, Tasha’s talk offers one clear reassurance. Feeling off balance does not mean you are failing.

It means the family just changed, and you are doing the work of becoming one team.

Want to watch the full talk?

You can find it here on UXDX: https://uxdx.com/session/the-real-impact-of-mergers-acquisitions-on-your-product-team/

Want to make your product career AI-Proof? Download our free ebook: https://uxdx.com/ebook/career-compression/