Making Product Management Valuable

This week, I’m unpacking one of the most frustrating (and common) situations I’ve run into during product consulting: working with a company where no one understands what the product managers do.

I was recently hired by a client whose leadership team viewed their product team as little more than ticket writers and status trackers. Even worse, their peers didn’t see them as helpful collaborators. They saw them as bottlenecks.

This newsletter shares the approach I took to help turn that around and rethink the role of product management so it adds visible, measurable, and strategic value to the business. If you’re working in a team that’s lost its way or struggling to define its value, this one’s for you.

If you’re a product person, your job is to create value. Internally for your stakeholders, partner, and the business itself. Externally for your customers.That’s the role.

But too often, product teams get absorbed by internal processes or consumed with output metrics. They submit JIRA tickets, manage sprint boards, sit in standups, and try to keep everything on track. In that version of the job, no one sees you as a leader. They see you as a project manager with opinions.

When product managers shift their focus to problems, strategy, and clarity, they elevate their role across the business. They make better decisions. And they build more respect and credibility from their peers.

That’s the product job most of us signed up for. And it’s the only version that actually works.

So then how did we all get so lost?

Most product teams are under pressure to move fast and ship. In that environment, it’s easy to confuse activity for impact. Many product managers get so caught up in the “how” and “when” that they forget to ask whether they’re solving the right problems in the first place.

They mistake delivery for value. They think their job is to push tickets forward. And eventually, they stop being product people and become paper pushers who attend meetings and send updates.

The truth is, you can’t earn a seat at the table by delivering features no one asked for, can’t measure, and don’t use.

If no one in your company understands what the product team does, it’s because the product team hasn’t made itself valuable.

So, how do you change that?

It's difficult. You need leaders who want to change and are actually comfortable changing.

That's out of your control. But let's focus on what you can control.

Takeaway 1: Focus on Problems, Not Projects

The most important shift a product manager can make is to focus on problems worth solving.

Not backlogs. Not release plans. Not how many story points your team completes in a sprint.

Start with the question: what customer problem are we solving? If the answer is vague or debated, stop everything and get clarity. Your roadmap should be driven by customer needs and business goals. Not convenience, tech capacity, or internal politics.

When product teams lead with problems, they become problem solvers. That is a valuable role in any organization. When they lead with output, they become middle managers in sneakers.

Takeaway 2: Bring Clarity Where There Is Confusion

At the company I mentioned earlier, there was no true product strategy. Very few people understood what was being built or why. This wasn’t a communication issue. It was a clarity issue.

Product managers weren’t driving alignment. They were just reacting to whatever came up in meetings.

One of the fastest ways to add value is to create shared understanding. Get the engineers, the designers, the marketers, and the execs aligned on what the product is doing, what problem it’s solving, and how success will be measured.

This doesn’t require long strategy decks. But it does require a clear vision of where you want to go and a roadmap of what steps you need to take to get there.

It requires clear product thinking, good storytelling, and tight facilitation. This group just had a list of random things they wanted to get done because someone said so and they called it a roadmap.

That's not a strategy. You can't create clarity without one.

Takeaway 3: Stop Mistaking Feature Work for Strategic Work

Many product people fall into the trap of thinking that “doing product” means designing features. That’s not the job. The job is to make decisions about what to build and what not to build.

It’s to prevent bad investments before they reach the roadmap. It’s to prioritize opportunities, not requirements.

When I asked the client to describe how they decide what to build next, they pointed to a spreadsheet of requests from sales, leadership, and support. No prioritization framework. No connection to outcomes. No defined customer problem.

We fixed that by introducing a basic opportunity assessment framework.

We asked: What’s the size of the problem? How urgent is it for our customers? What’s the impact on our business if we solve it? What's the impact on our business if we don't?

Just asking those questions will give the product team credibility. They won’t be guessing anymore. They'll be making decisions rooted in evidence.

Takeaway 4: Show You Understand the Business

The product managers at this company were comfortable talking about customer needs. (Even though they were pretty broad, largely assumed and not truly validated)

But when asked about business KPIs, they froze. They didn’t know if any of their work was impactful. They didn’t know how their product added value for customers. They just looked at revenue. They didn't truly know if their work directly impacted that either.

If you want to be taken seriously as a product person, you need to speak both customer and business. You need to understand the model. You need to be able to connect product decisions to business outcomes.

Ask yourself, can you explain how your roadmap connects to your company’s financial goals? If not, you need to start there.

Otherwise, you’ll always be seen as a foreman in the feature factory.

Takeaway 5: Make Your Work Visible

One of the reasons this client’s product team wasn’t respected was that the little bits of strategic work they actually did do wasn’t visible.

Here's the tricky thing about Product in these environments. You don't deliver anything. Any fungible thing that "gets released" is someone else's work. You're not creating designs. You're not writing code. You're not creating the marketing billboards. You're not selling anything.

If you're not driving discovery, or interviewing customers, or setting a strategic path and aligning people to it, the people who say "the Product team doesn't seem to do anything" are correct.

You're not doing anything. Nothing of value anyway.

You're just an extra set of hands to take notes and schedule meetings. What do you have to showcase if that's your focus?

So we built a simple habit to help them make their newly discovered strategy work visible: monthly share-outs.

Once a month, the product team would share key insights from research, recent decisions made, customer problems discovered, and what was learned from anything released.

It pushes the product team to keep learning, to talk about problems and outcomes instead of features, and to share that thinking with the company.

It's not fancy, and I'm sure you're not picking your jaw up off the floor. But if your job is strategic in nature, you MUST bring visibility to the strategy you're recommending, why you believe it's the right choice, and the outcomes it will create.

Slowly, leadership will begin to see them as stewards of customer understanding and business focus.

That’s when the perception starts to shift.

In Conclusion

Product managers exist to solve problems, create clarity, and help their companies make better decisions.

But none of that matters if the organization doesn’t see it. If the value of your role isn’t obvious, it’s not on your peers. It’s on you.

So start with problems. Make your decisions visible. Prioritize what matters to your customers and your business. And most importantly, stop trying to prove your worth by the number of features you ship.

You don’t earn respect by being busy. You earn it by making an impact.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.