Product Management: The Cult of Empty Thinking

Welcome to the cult of empty thinking! Where buzzwords stand in for substance, and progress is a PowerPoint slide.

Product management isn’t about innovation: it is a circus of recycled ideas steeped in jargon and a theatre of busywork masquerading as progress. Exceptional PMs do exist. They are the rare few who ship products that matter, not merely products that asymptotically achieve vanity metrics. The rest are merely professional taskmasters who slap “ASAP” stickers on outdated ideas and call it a “vision.” It is a tough gig, one that comes with vague responsibilities yet without the authority to actually make things happen. If teams manage to ship a product successfully, it is often despite, not because of their PMs, though. These glorified admins shove loads of people in meetings because they think it is what their managers mean when they say “stakeholder management.”

PMs love to talk about customer obsession: it’s a pity they are obsessed with the wrong customers. Oh, hello, stakeholders!

Most PMs aren’t solving problems: they are hoovering up requirements as if stale crumbs were valuable. Ask them why a feature exists, and they’ll belt out the hits of corporate karaoke: “Customer centricity! Synergies!! AI-powered disruption!!!” Translation: “Because someone in a Zoom call said so.”

Spoiler alert: If your roadmap is a to-do list of customer demands, your product is a digital landfill.

If they have skimmed at least one product management book in their life or overheard someone who might have actually read a book, they’ll nod sagely and proclaim: “Product/market fit.” Just don’t expect them to explain it. And if they can, watch them use the Sean Ellis test on internal platforms where users do not have viable alternatives, so asking how users would feel if the only tool they had to do their jobs is removed is a bit of a moot question.

Got insomnia? Read a vision doc from a typical PM. They read like LLM-generated slop, except that would be an insult to AIs. These risk-averse declarations of a severe lack of inspiration are littered with phrases such as “leverage best-in-class solutions” (read: copy our competitors) and “strategic alignment” (a.k.a. collective procrastination). The important questions are always buried under six layers of “let’s circle back.” Their six-pagers all have appendicitis and suffer from obesity: full of fat and no meat, where Appendix Q shows some tables of questionable origin that prove the main idea, though that idea is never stated clearly and definitely not upfront. No, decreasing the margins to 0.01 mm and the font size to 6 pt does not make a 24-page masterpiece a six-pager.

Product management is often not about a strategic vision or groundbreaking insights: it is the stuff engineers skip or at least would prefer to skip. When PMs talk to customers, they misinterpret half of what was said, so they still have to “loop in” engineers to get things done. Such PMs are like secretaries with an inflated ego: taking notes and afterwards taking credit. Except nowadays the note-taking has been outsourced to half-baked AIs that churn out page-long summaries that are somehow still just as shallow as the PM’s original scribbles that misspell the core technology the team relies on. Yet again. So, the PM is now reduced to merely switching on the AI transcriber/summarizer at the beginning of the meeting while forcing a “round of introductions” for the same group of people and staring into the void when it’s time for the “next steps.”

The “high-impact” PM isn’t the one quietly unblocking engineers and thinking a few quarters ahead: it is the one hosting daily TED Talks on “alignment” (translation: repeating what engineers just said, but louder and with less clarity). Their LinkedIn is filled with endorsements from when they were either interns in an unrelated field or under the management of clueless product leaders who hired these dummies. They’ll dazzle you with Miro boards full of colourful shapes and arrows that explain nothing, and then vanish when actual decisions are due. They fuss about labels in Jira, because that’s strategy, right?

Pro tip: If you work with such a product manager, ask them to explain their reasoning behind prioritization. Afterwards, do the exact opposite if you want to do the right thing at the right time. Just say you’re blocked for vaguely technical reasons. Works every time. Just don’t tell them—they’ll call it a “framework” and charge $10,000 per seminar.

So, who’s up for promotion? The person who holds ten-minute monologues with an audience of the product team meeting every week. It is the same person who plasters Slack full of “insightful” articles they stumbled upon while asking ChatGPT for the twelfth time: “What is CI/CD?” That joker collects Slack emoji reactions as a badge of honour and evidence of their impact. The signal-to-noise ratio in corporate Slack channels is already abysmal, so why not add a piece you neither read nor understood with a half-page personal note of why people ought to read it? At least as long as it does not constitute an actual summary or how it pertains to the business. That would actually be useful, and PMs don’t do useful. They waste time. Everyone’s.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting to attend. Something about aligning synergies for an agile innovation workshop on thought leadership. Yes, I’ll share the meeting notes no one will read anyway. And next week, we’ll circle back to misinterpret them all over again. I am so excited!