Recognizing You’ve Outgrown Your Role

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Today, I want to discuss how to identify when your role is no longer helping you grow as a product manager and what to do about it.

Staying too long in the wrong product role quietly kills your momentum. You don’t notice it right away, but over time, your scope shrinks, your influence plateaus, and your motivation fades. Recognizing the signs early can help you reclaim your trajectory.

It's easy to confuse comfort with growth. You stay because you like the team, or you know the systems, or because change feels like a hassle. So you trade progress for familiarity and start to rot from the inside out.

This can happen for many reasons. This has happened to me multiple times. But the last time looked something like this.

We're in an ideation session. There's been plenty of turnover in the previous year. I am surrounded by a lot of new, younger faces.

As we're going around and spitballing ideas, I am hearing nothing but ideas and hypotheses that I have personally been involved in exploring in the past.

When we gather at the end to start organizing and prioritizing the ideas, as any good teammate would, I share insights I have from customer research journeys of recent years, explaining why many of these possible opportunities don't have legs.

As I am knocking down an idea for the third or fourth time, it hits me.

Companies WANT product people with fresh perspectives. They WANT product people who are going to question existing beliefs. They WANT product people who will go out and ask the same questions again to see if the market has changed.

Now, for quick context, I'm talking about things I had looked at like 2 years prior. Some trends change quickly. Most do not. But whether or not I was right isn't the point.

The point is, I had crossed over to the other side. From someone with fresh ideas and perspectives on how to solve a problem to someone who had reasons that proposed solutions won't work.

But here is the other and more important part. This discussion was boring me out of my fucking mind. This wasn't the first time we had revisited old ground. It was like the 20th.

And that is when I realized, not only are we just going in circles, I just don't care anymore. I no longer feel motivated by this work.

And that, my friends, is when I knew it was time to move on. It is VERY difficult to be a good Product Manager if you aren't truly driven to solve problems.

If you’re doing your job well and still bored, it’s a sign you’ve stopped growing.

My realization came to me in an "aha" moment. But there were signs I should have picked up sooner. Let's run through them and see if any of you are experiencing the same thing.

Takeaway 1: Mastery is not momentum

In the early stages of a product role, everything is new. You’re learning the customer base, navigating the tech stack, and understanding the business model. The ramp-up phase can be thrilling. But at some point, you stop climbing and start circling.

It feels like success. You’re efficient. You’re respected. People trust you. But there’s a difference between being good at your job and getting better.

Product managers often confuse mastery with momentum. Just because you’re in flow doesn’t mean you’re moving forward. You can operate at a high level and still be standing still.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time you were uncomfortable in a productive way? When was the last time you struggled with something new and had to recalibrate your approach? If it’s been more than six months, you’re likely plateauing.

This was me in the example I gave above. I had a lot of answers, but I had stopped asking questions. Best to realize this sooner, than later, because once you realize this is where you're at, your performance will start to fade soon after.

Takeaway 2: Feedback has dried up

Early on, product managers get a lot of feedback. Stakeholders challenge your priorities. Engineers question your assumptions. Designers offer new ways of thinking. It’s stressful, but it stretches you.

As you get more experienced, that feedback gets quieter. Not because you’re perfect. Because people start to assume you’ve got it under control. They stop pushing you.

That can feel nice, but it’s actually dangerous. Growth happens on the edge of discomfort. When people stop challenging you, it becomes easy to fall into a rhythm where you’re optimizing the same ideas over and over.

If your 1:1s feel like status updates, if you’re getting high-fives instead of hard questions, if your reviews are all “great job again”, you might be stagnating.

Challenges are how we grow. A fear of failure motivates us to overachieve. If you're just staying status quo, you will fall to the middle of the pack.

Start seeking feedback again. Ask different stakeholders. Go outside your team. If you’re met with generic praise, you’re probably overdue for a stretch assignment or a new environment entirely.

Takeaway 3: You’re solving the same types of problems over and over

Every product manager has a “type” of problem they gravitate toward. For some, it’s UX pain points. For others, it’s tech debt or platform strategy. You develop playbooks and get good at solving them fast.

But once you’ve solved the same type of problem five or six times, it stops being developmental. It becomes muscle memory. The work stays busy. The calendar stays full. But the challenges disappear.

And to compound this, once you're labeled as the "go-to" person for those types of problems, you start to get pulled into more of them.

Look at your last three product cycles. Were the challenges materially different? Did you have to learn a new skill to succeed? Did you partner with a different type of team? If not, you’re in a comfort loop.

Takeaway 4: You’re managing more process than product

This one is probably more applicable to people in roles with the title of Product Manager, but are stuck in a company that doesn't understand what Product is. But if this is something you can relate to, you probably need this newsletter more than anyone.

Whether you started out this way, or ended up there over time, one of the clearest signs you’ve outgrown your role is when you stop influencing the “what” and spend most of your time managing the “how.”

You’re coordinating roadmaps across teams. Running planning sessions. Updating dashboards. Prepping stakeholder slides. You’re doing work that looks important, but it’s mostly maintenance.

You’re a glorified traffic cop.

This usually happens when companies grow but don’t evolve your role. You stay tied to the same domain, but your remit gets narrower. You spend more time managing cross-functional chaos than shaping product outcomes.

The further you get from customer problems and product decisions, you realize it's not possible to grow as a product manager.

Great product people crave complexity. They want to wrestle with ambiguous tradeoffs and unclear data. They want to sit in the tension between what users need and what the business wants.

If you’re just managing tickets, it’s time to rethink your role.

Takeaway 5: You keep telling yourself a version of “but I like my team”

This is the most common rationalization. You know you’re not learning. You know you’re not excited. But you like the people. You like the culture. You’re not miserable—just a little bored. So you stay.

This is the trap that catches high-performing product managers the most.

You don’t leave because nothing’s wrong. But nothing’s pushing you either. You slowly disconnect from the ambition that brought you here in the first place.

Here’s the truth: your team can be great, and still not be the right place for your growth anymore.

You can stay in touch with your coworkers. You can appreciate the culture. But you owe it to yourself to chase your own development.

Because no one else will do it for you.

In Conclusion

If you’ve been feeling stuck but can’t articulate why, chances are you’ve outgrown the version of the role you’re in.

That doesn’t mean you’re ungrateful. It doesn’t mean your team isn’t great. It means you’ve done your job well. And now it’s time to find the next challenge.

Growth doesn’t happen automatically. It requires discomfort. It requires change. Sometimes it requires walking away from something good to go find something better.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.