Managing Up in Product Management Today I want to discuss how to effectively manage up as a product manager without becoming a political operator, a yes-person, or a blocker to your own team. Senior stakeholders hold the keys to your funding, your headcount, and your strategic runway. If you don’t know how to speak their language, they’ll second-guess your work, question your priorities, and quietly hand influence to someone else. The most impactful product managers are great at translating...
11 days ago • 5 min read
When Consensus is a Mistake Chasing consensus in product decisions wastes time, creates mediocrity, and subtly kills accountability. There I said it. You will never have 100% alignment from every stakeholder. Trying to achieve it slows everything down, drains your energy, and dilutes product outcomes. Product managers who obsess over consensus end up pleasing no one and shipping nothing of consequence. Strong teams make aligned decisions. But aligned does not mean unanimous. Because...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Being Too Hands-On as a Product Manager Product managers are taught to “own the product,” but many interpret that as owning every decision. The more involved you are, the more you feel like you're adding value. But too much involvement stifles your team, clouds decision-making, and slows everything down. If you're the bottleneck, you're not leading. You're just in the way. It feels safer to be involved in everything. You know the context, you’ve done the research, you see how the parts...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Company goals disguised as customer problems Almost every roadmap item you touch will be justified with a user story. But plenty of those “needs” are fake. Some are wishful thinking. Some are assumptions. Some are just internal company objectives wearing a pair of fake glasses with a mustache. If you don’t know how to sniff out the difference, you’ll end up building things that sound noble but land with a thud. So why do so many Product Managers fail at this? They don’t push hard enough on...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
“They Said They Wanted It” Every product manager eventually faces the same challenge. A senior stakeholder drops a feature request in your lap. Sometimes it comes from Sales, sometimes Marketing, sometimes the CEO. They usually come with a deadline and a reason that sounds urgent. If you don’t know how to push back thoughtfully; or worse, if you just say yes, you’ll find yourself buried under work that doesn’t move the needle. They confuse being collaborative with being compliant. They think...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Waiting for someone else to create your strategy is a trap Most product managers at the junior or mid-level spend too much time waiting for a “real” strategy to show up. They assume someone more senior will set direction and they’ll just execute. The problem is that product people who don’t practice thinking strategically stay stuck executing someone else’s to-do list. If you want to grow, you have to learn how to lead strategy before someone asks you to. Many think strategy is reserved for...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
MVPs: When Minimum = Meaningless Almost every product manager has been told to “start with an MVP.” But what that means in practice is often a disaster. Most MVPs are just smaller versions of the thing you wanted to build anyway. They’re scoped-down apps, stripped of value, and disguised as experiments. So instead of validating anything, you just build faster and fail slower. They think MVP means “the cheapest version of the product you want to build.” But MVPs aren’t about launching faster....
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Why Most Product Ideas Die Quietly The backlog is where good ideas go to die. For most product managers, it becomes a cluttered mess of stakeholder requests, customer quotes, aspirational ideas, and one-off experiments that never went anywhere. The signal gets buried under noise, and when planning time rolls around, nobody can make sense of it. It creates chaos instead of clarity. And worse, it makes product managers look unorganized and indecisive. They treat the backlog like a museum...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Stop Prioritizing Speed Over Progress Today we're going to discuss the difference between real product progress and the illusion of momentum created by speed. Early-career product managers often get praised for being "fast." People say "Fail fast" or "Be quick to pivot". And while those statements good mantras generally speaking, speed can be deceptive. Moving quickly doesn’t mean you’re moving in the right direction. And it certainly isn't an indicator of progress. Over time, chasing speed...
2 months ago • 4 min read