The Trap of “Being Helpful”

This week, I’m going to walk you through one of the most common traps junior and even mid-level product managers fall into: mistaking responsiveness and availability for effectiveness.

It starts innocently. You answer questions quickly, offer to write up docs, sit in extra meetings, and jump into every problem.

But before long, you’re underwater. Your core responsibilities slip, and you’re not seen as a strategic leader. You’re seen as “the person who helps out.”

If you don’t fix this early, you’ll burn out and plateau. Your calendar fills up, but your impact shrinks. You’ll feel busy, but you won’t be doing high-leverage work.

Worse, you’ll teach your partners to expect you to play this part every day. Soon, it's not just you, but your teammates who have those expectations thrown on them as well.

The result is a team that gets slower and less autonomous over time. Nobody wins.

We want to be seen as dependable. We want to unblock people. We want to feel needed.

But Product Management is not customer service. And we don't add as much value as you'd like to think by "helping out" with a bunch of internal, self-inflicted problems.

If you confuse availability with influence, you end up in a reactive cycle that kills your ability to lead.

If you say yes to everything, people stop asking for your opinion and start treating you like a ticketing system.

Let's dive deeper.

Takeaway 1: Helping everyone doesn’t mean you’re valuable

Early-career Product folks often equate responsiveness with competence.

You get a DM asking how something works and you respond in two minutes. Someone’s confused about a Jira ticket and you jump in to rewrite it. A designer is stuck on something, so you offer to mock it up yourself.

You think you’re being useful. And in the moment, maybe you are.

But over time, this dynamic builds dependence. Your team stops trying to answer their own questions.

Instead of reading the documentation or thinking through trade-offs, they just come to you. And you keep answering, because that’s what good Product Managers do, right?

No. Good Product Managers build systems, not dependencies. They create clarity, not codependency.

If you disappear for a day and everything breaks down, that’s not a sign you’re essential. It’s a sign you’ve become a crutch.

Takeaway 2: Every yes is a trade-off, whether you admit it or not

When you say yes to every question, every meeting, and every Slack ping, you’re not just being helpful. You’re giving up focus.

You’re fragmenting your time. And the big stuff, the stuff that actually moves the product forward, suffers.

Let’s say you spend 45 minutes helping someone debug a launch checklist. That’s 45 minutes you didn’t spend writing a clear product strategy. Or thinking about customer feedback patterns. Or reviewing a poorly scoped initiative before engineering starts building it.

That’s the hidden cost of “being helpful.” It’s not always obvious. But over time, it adds up to a PM who’s everywhere and nowhere at once.

The best PMs protect their time ruthlessly. Not because they’re selfish, but because they understand that their job is to create leverage. And that doesn’t happen in back-to-back Slack triage.

Takeaway 3: Urgency doesn’t mean importance

Slack has trained us to think that everything needs a response now. But just because someone asks for something “real quick,” doesn’t mean it’s actually urgent.

A message can feel important simply because it’s immediate. That’s a trap.

You don’t have to respond right away to be a good teammate. You don’t have to join every fire drill to prove your value. Sometimes, the best response is no response until you’ve finished what matters most.

Here’s a simple practice: instead of defaulting to “let me get back to you right away,” try “let me check and circle back in a bit.”

That alone creates space for prioritization. It tells your team that you’re not ignoring them, you’re just not jumping every time someone says “urgent.”

In fact, I rarely respond to emails. Like, ever. If it's truly urgent, they'll either reach out again, or in a different channel. And I never respond at all when someone when I am a "CC" recipient or to a message that begins with "+ Mike".

Most of the time, someone else lets their time be wasted and responds anyway.

Not everything needs your immediate attention. In fact, ost things can wait. Teach your team to expect focus, not instant replies.

Takeaway 4: You’re not their manager. Stop acting like it.

This one’s tough, especially on teams without strong engineering leads.

Product Managers often fill the leadership void. You step in to manage timelines, coach developers, check on Jira tickets, and basically act like a part-time Engineering Manager.

Again, this feels helpful. You think you’re filling a gap.

But here’s the problem. That’s not your job. You can collaborate on priorities, but you’re not responsible for every delivery.

You can raise risks, but you shouldn't be the one solving them to aid execution. You can escalate issues, but you’re not there to performance manage.

The more you insert yourself into day-to-day engineering work, the less ownership the team has. Now they expect to just be spoon-fed requirements. And ironically, the more broken things become. Here's the harsh reality, doing those things really isn't valuable.

Set the bar, clarify the goals, create focus. Then get out of the way. Your job is not to control the work. It’s to create the conditions where good work happens without you needing to babysit it.

Takeaway 5: Strategic thinking needs space

You know what doesn’t happen between Zoom meetings and Slack pings? Product strategy. Or customer pattern recognition. Or spotting signals in the noise.

You need space to think. You need time to synthesize. And you won’t get that if you’re stuck in reactive mode all day.

High-leverage product management looks boring from the outside. It looks like blocks of unbooked time. It looks like walks around the block, long stares at customer interviews, or re-writing the roadmap five times in a notebook before it ever hits a slide.

You can’t do any of that if your calendar is full and your Slack is always green.

Start blocking focus time and protecting it like it’s a meeting with the CEO. Because it is. You’re the CEO of your own time. Act like it.

In Conclusion

You didn’t become a product manager to be everyone’s on-call assistant. You did it to drive impact. To make smart decisions. To align people around what matters.

If you find yourself constantly reacting, constantly helping, constantly context switching, it’s time to step back.

Being helpful is good. Being available is good. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re not doing product work. You’re just busy.

Reclaim your calendar. Protect your thinking. Teach your team to operate without you in every conversation.

That’s how you become a great Product Manager. Not by being everywhere, but by being in the right place at the right time, doing the work that actually moves the needle.

The struggle is real, but it can be done.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.