Product Management for People Who Want to Ship Things That Matter

Your product isn't failing because you lack a comprehensive roadmap or perfect prioritization framework. It's failing because you're optimizing for the appearance of product management instead of actually managing a product.

You've got beautiful roadmaps that nobody follows, detailed user personas that describe people who don't exist, and elaborate feature prioritization matrices that somehow always justify building whatever the loudest executive wants. You're performing product strategy for an audience of stakeholders who confuse being busy with being effective.

Meanwhile, your actual users are struggling with basic workflows that have been broken for months, your competitors are shipping features that solve real problems, and your team is building elaborate solutions to problems nobody actually has.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: you've confused product management theater with product management.

You're spending more time creating artifacts that prove you're doing product management than actually improving your product. You're optimizing for process compliance instead of user success. You're managing stakeholder expectations instead of managing user outcomes.

This is why your product doesn't matter to the people who are supposed to use it.

The Real Cost of Product Management Theater

When you're performing product management instead of doing it, the damage extends beyond missed deadlines and feature bloat:

• 6-12 month product-market fit delays while you perfect your positioning instead of testing with real users

• 40-60% feature abandonment rates because you're building solutions to problems you assumed existed

• Team burnout and turnover as smart people realize they're building elaborate nonsense

• Competitive disadvantage as simpler products with clearer value props steal your users

Your users don't care about your sophisticated product strategy. They care about whether your product helps them accomplish something they're trying to do. When product management becomes more important than the product, you've lost the plot entirely.

The Product Management Theater Troupe

The Strategic Product Owner (AKA The Roadmap Artist)

This person creates beautiful roadmaps that look like they were designed by someone who actually knows what they're doing. Quarter-over-quarter themes, color-coded priorities, and dependency arrows that form an elegant narrative about the product's inevitable march toward success.

The roadmap is a work of art. The product is a piece of shit.

They can tell you exactly what features are planned for Q3 2026, but they have no idea whether the features shipping this month actually solve user problems. They prioritize based on whoever yelled at them most recently, then justify it with elaborate scoring frameworks that always produce the predetermined result.

The Customer-Obsessed Persona Builder (AKA The Fictional Character Developer)

This person has created detailed profiles of users who don't exist based on assumptions they've never validated. "Marketing Manager Melissa" is 34 years old, lives in Portland, drinks oat milk lattes, and struggles with cross-platform attribution. They know everything about Melissa except whether she actually exists or would use your product.

They've built an entire product strategy around people they've never met, solving problems they've never witnessed, using workflows they've never observed. They confuse creating buyer personas with understanding users, and they're genuinely surprised when real people don't behave like their fictional characters.

The Data-Driven Decision Maker (AKA The Metrics Theater Director)

This person has dashboards for everything and insights about nothing. They can tell you the exact conversion rate for every step of your funnel, but they can't explain why people drop off or what would make them stay. They measure activity instead of outcomes, outputs instead of impact.

They're drowning in data but starving for understanding. They've confused having metrics with having insights, and they make "data-driven" decisions based on numbers that don't actually drive decisions. They optimize for metrics that make executives happy instead of changes that make users successful.

The Innovation Champion (AKA The Feature Factory Foreman)

This person equates shipping features with creating value. They measure success by velocity, story points, and feature completion rates. They celebrate shipping the authentication system redesign while users still can't figure out how to reset their passwords.

They've turned product development into an elaborate assembly line for producing features nobody asked for. They're optimizing for output instead of outcomes, shipping instead of solving, building instead of helping.

The 5 Acts of Product Management Theater

Act 1: The User Research Charade

Teams gather for "user research" that consists of asking leading questions to confirm what they already decided to build. "Would you find it valuable if we added advanced filtering options?" Of course they say yes - who doesn't want more features?

These interviews validate assumptions instead of challenging them. The questions focus on hypothetical features rather than observing people actually using the product. Teams confuse user feedback with user research and wonder why their "validated" features don't get adopted.

This isn't user research. It's confirmation bias with a research methodology costume.

Act 2: The Prioritization Matrix Performance

Stakeholders gather to score features using sophisticated frameworks that somehow always justify building what the highest-paid person in the room wants. Reach/impact/confidence matrices, weighted scoring models, and elaborate calculations produce objective-looking results from subjective inputs.

Everyone nods seriously while assigning numerical values to completely unmeasurable concepts like "strategic alignment" and "user delight." The process looks scientific, but the results are predetermined. It's mathematics disguising politics.

Act 3: The Roadmap Presentation

Product teams present quarterly roadmaps with the confidence of someone who actually knows what's going to happen in the next 90 days. Themes, epics, and milestones are arranged in perfect harmony. Everything connects to business objectives and user outcomes.

It's a beautiful story about a future that will never exist as planned. More time gets spent updating the roadmap than building the product, but at least stakeholders feel informed about the fiction everyone's collectively creating.

Act 4: The Feature Launch Celebration

Features ship with great fanfare, measuring success by adoption rates and usage metrics instead of user outcomes. Teams celebrate increased engagement without asking whether that engagement actually helps people accomplish anything useful.

The optimization focuses on activity instead of value. People use the features, but they're not any more successful than they were before. These are digital fidget spinners: engaging but ultimately meaningless.

Act 5: The Retrospective Ritual

Teams gather to discuss what went well, what could be improved, and what they'll do differently next time. The same problems get identified as last quarter, with commitments to the same process improvements that didn't work before, and follow-up actions that nobody will take.

This treats symptoms instead of causes, optimizing process instead of outcomes. The fundamental problem - building things people don't need - remains completely unaddressed.

Warning Signs Your Team Is Doing Product Management Theater

Strategy Over Users:

• More time spent on roadmaps than talking to users

• User personas more detailed than user research

• Can explain product strategy but not a single user workflow

Process Over Progress:

• Feature prioritization process more sophisticated than the features

• Measuring team velocity but not user success

• Elaborate planning rituals that ship incremental improvements

Artifacts Over Outcomes:

• Documentation more polished than the product

• More internal presentations than user value created

• Better at explaining methodology than showing results

Internal Focus Over External Impact:

• Stakeholder satisfaction more important than user satisfaction

• OKRs measuring internal metrics instead of user outcomes

• Optimizing for executive dashboards instead of user success

If this sounds familiar, the team has successfully implemented product management theater. Congratulations on creating the illusion of product strategy while the actual product stagnates.

How to Actually Manage Products Instead of Managing Product Management

Step 1: Get Uncomfortably Close to Real Users

Stop building products for imaginary personas and start solving problems for actual people. Spend time with users in their natural environment, watching them struggle with tasks you thought were simple, discovering needs you never knew existed.

Real user research isn't asking people what they want: it's observing what they actually do. Stop conducting interviews and start conducting observations. The gap between what people say they do and what they actually do is where real product insights live.

Step 2: Simplify Your Prioritization Process

Your elaborate scoring frameworks are just complicated ways to avoid making decisions. Start with one simple question: "Will this make our users more successful at something they're trying to accomplish?"

If you can't answer that question clearly, you don't understand the problem well enough to build a solution. If the answer is no, don't build it regardless of how many points it scored in your matrix.

Step 3: Focus on Outcomes, Not Outputs

Stop measuring how much you're shipping and start measuring whether what you're shipping actually helps. Your success metrics should reflect user success, not team activity.

Instead of tracking story points completed, track problems solved. Instead of measuring feature adoption, measure user goal completion. Instead of celebrating launches, celebrate the moment when users become more successful because of something you built.

Step 4: Kill Your Backlog Monster

Your 247-item backlog isn't helping you: it's paralyzing you. Most of those items represent problems you've forgotten, solutions that no longer make sense, or features that were never important in the first place.

Keep a maximum of 3-5 things you're actually going to build. Everything else is just elaborate procrastination disguised as comprehensive planning.

Step 5: Test Assumptions Before Building Solutions

Every feature you build represents a bet about what users need and how they'll behave. Most of these bets are wrong. The expensive way to discover this is to build the feature and watch it fail. The smart way is to test the assumption before building the solution.

Build the smallest possible version that tests whether your assumption is correct. Most of the time, you'll discover your elegant solution solves the wrong problem or solves the right problem in the wrong way.

Essential Resources for Real Product Management

Strategy and Planning Reality Checks

• How to Prioritize When Everything Is a Priority - Cut through stakeholder politics and make actual decisions about what matters most

• Your Backlog: The Junk Drawer of Product Development - Stop hoarding feature fantasies and focus on building solutions to real problems

User Research and Customer Understanding

• Stop Calling It "Discovery" If You're Not Talking to Customers - How to do actual user research instead of assumption validation theater

• The Real Reason Product Roadmaps Get Ignored - Connect your planning to user needs instead of internal politics

Feature Development and Product Decisions

• Your MVP Is Too Polite. Ship Something That Might Actually Offend Someone - Build products with clear value propositions instead of bland, committee-designed features

• Still Using OKRs? No Wonder Your Product Sucks - Alternative measurement frameworks that focus on user outcomes instead of internal metrics

What High-Performing Product Teams Actually Do

Teams that ship products people love don't follow elaborate methodologies: they follow their users. They spend more time understanding problems than engineering solutions. They measure user success instead of team velocity.

They build small things that solve real problems instead of large things that solve theoretical problems. They test assumptions quickly and cheaply instead of building elaborate solutions based on untested hypotheses.

They understand that product management is about making users more successful, not making stakeholders more comfortable. They optimize for user outcomes instead of internal metrics.

Related Strategy and Process Guides

Process and Team Coordination:

• Fix Your Broken Agile Process - Stop performing agility and start shipping valuable products faster

Communication and Stakeholder Management:

• How to Communicate Like a Competent Adult in a Corporate Environment - Navigate stakeholder politics without compromising product decisions

Goal Setting and Measurement:

• Goal Setting That Actually Works (Unlike Your Current OKRs) - Align your team around user outcomes instead of vanity metrics

Project Execution:

• The Complete Guide to Fixing Broken Project Management Processes - Execute product development without drowning in ceremony and overhead

Stop Managing Product Management, Start Managing Products

The elaborate frameworks and comprehensive documentation you've created aren't making your product better - they're distracting you from the work that actually matters: understanding user problems and building solutions that solve them.

While you optimize for the appearance of good product management, your competitors optimize for actual user success. While you build features that look impressive in presentations, they build solutions that work in practice.

What makes the difference isn't sophisticated methodology but relentless focus on whether your product helps users accomplish something important. The real challenge isn't perfecting your process - it's understanding problems deeply enough to solve them effectively.

The best product managers aren't the ones with the most sophisticated process. They're the ones whose users are most successful.

Tired of performing product strategy instead of building products that matter? Join other frustrated PMs who get weekly reality checks about what actually works in product development. Subscribe to The Cranky PM Newsletter for frameworks that focus on user success, not stakeholder theater.