Product Management is Killing Your Product

You think you’re doing everything right. Your team is following the roadmap. You’re gathering customer feedback, hitting your OKRs, and tracking every metric imaginable. And yet, your product is stuck. Users churn, innovation stalls, and your team feels like they’re running on a never-ending treadmill.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: these very practices—roadmaps, obsessive customer listening, and metrics worship—are strangling your product’s potential.

The Broken Playbook

For years, product managers have been told that success comes from mastering a core set of tools and practices. Roadmaps provide alignment. Metrics offer clarity. Customer feedback drives iteration. These methods were meant to ensure control and predictability.

But here’s the problem: The world doesn’t care about your roadmap. Customers’ needs change faster than you can build. Metrics often reflect past performance, not future opportunities. And customers? They can tell you about their pain points but rarely articulate the groundbreaking solutions they need. If you follow these rules too rigidly, you end up chasing lagging indicators instead of leading innovation.

Everywhere you look in product management, there’s a reverence for “best practices.” Teams are trained to treat roadmaps as gospel, OKRs as strategic truth, and customers as the ultimate source of insight. But these methods were created for an environment where markets changed slowly and predictability was achievable. In today’s world of rapid shifts and digital disruption, this mindset is a liability.

What do you do when the very foundations of your craft have become the chains holding you back?

You’re Failing While Following the Rules

Think about the last time your team hit all its milestones and still felt like they were losing. You shipped everything on the roadmap, but customers weren’t delighted. You optimized your funnel, but growth plateaued. You iterated based on user feedback, but no one cared about the new features.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re symptoms of a deeper problem: product management has become too focused on control, predictability, and incremental improvements. In doing so, we’ve forgotten what drives real breakthroughs—bold decisions, adaptability, and a willingness to challenge the rules.

Consider companies that have revolutionized industries. Did Netflix follow a roadmap defined by customer surveys? Did Amazon optimize around static KPIs, or did they constantly experiment with business models that defied expectations? Visionary products and companies succeed by rejecting rigid frameworks and embracing the unknown.

If you’re stuck in cycles of “roadmap success, product failure,” it’s time to reassess the rules you’re following.

The Illusion of Control

Roadmaps, OKRs, and metrics create the illusion of control. They provide comforting structure in a chaotic world. But that comfort comes at a cost. When you’re too focused on hitting targets, you blind yourself to new opportunities. You optimize for what’s measurable instead of what’s meaningful. You’re stuck fine-tuning yesterday’s ideas while your competitors are creating tomorrow’s.

Let’s talk about roadmaps. They give stakeholders a sense of predictability: features neatly laid out, timelines clearly defined. But in practice, roadmaps often lock teams into commitments that are irrelevant by the time they’re delivered. Teams optimize to hit deadlines rather than build impactful products. Roadmaps also assume that customer needs are static, when in reality, they’re constantly evolving.

Metrics are another comforting illusion. They provide numbers that seem to quantify success. But metrics are often backward-looking. By the time you’ve optimized for a particular KPI, your competition may already be moving on to the next opportunity. Chasing metrics without context leads to products that meet performance goals but fail to capture hearts and minds.

Finally, there’s the obsession with customer feedback. Of course, listening to customers is important—but only to a point. Customers are great at identifying problems but notoriously bad at envisioning transformative solutions. They often ask for incremental improvements instead of bold leaps. If you’re too reliant on feedback, you’re likely to get stuck in a loop of small iterations with diminishing returns.

Innovation doesn’t come from following a roadmap. It comes from knowing when to throw the roadmap away.

What’s Next: Break the Rules

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Product teams everywhere are trapped by outdated practices designed for a slower, more predictable era. The good news? You can break free.

In the coming articles, we’ll explore how to challenge and dismantle these sacred practices. You’ll learn to abandon rigid roadmaps, focus on customer insight instead of obsession, and prioritize continuous learning over failing fast. It’s time to rethink what it means to build products that matter.

This journey won’t be comfortable. Some of the strategies we’ll discuss may feel counterintuitive or even risky. But real success demands boldness. It requires letting go of the need for control and embracing uncertainty.

Ask yourself: Are you ready to tear down the product management playbook and build something better?

Because your product’s future depends on it.