The Hard Truth About Product Management: Get Back to Basics

This piece is a passionate call to action for product managers to get back to the basics of building products, along with a how-to guide

This statement must be said — controversial, yes, but still needs to be said:

If you are not spending at least half your time in the weeds with your customers, understanding their pain points, and with your business teams, you are not really a Product Manager.

You might have the title, but you are missing the essence of the role.

Now that we have established the hard truth, let’s dig deeper.

The Identity Crisis in Product Management

These past few years, I have watched with growing concern as the PM role has morphed into something unrecognizable across corporations. We have become solution architects, delivery managers (no-thanks to the product-owner role), and glorified support staff — functions that should easily be leveraging AI.

Let’s be brutally honest: If your calendar is filled with standups, sprint planning, and refinement sessions, or if you are micromanaging your design counterparts and engineering partners, you’re not functioning as a true Product Manager. You have ultimately become a hybrid of a product designer, solution architect, or even a scrum master.

Enough with the Excuses

When speaking with some product managers, I hear a variant of these statements consistently:

• “I am just following orders’’ — no real vision here.
• “Product discovery? Who has time for that?”
• “We don’t have a dedicated research team.”

If this resonates with you, perhaps it is time to consider a transition to a corporate Product Owner or Product Designer role. Those are respectable positions with excellent compensation — but they are not Product Management.

Taking Control of Your Product Management Destiny

Here is the liberating truth: You do not need permission to do product discovery!

I remember many years ago when I started leading a new product team. There was no research team, but we had a product. I started the test with my grandmother (78 years old at the time) and I got tremendous insights as it related to how much friction our product had. I tested this with both new and existing friends, as well as with random people at church. I received so much feedback over the next one month that, after dissecting and analyzing the data, my CEO mandated (and funded) the formation of a small new research team. I recommend you get the book “The Mom Test”. It puts into perspective how easy products and experiences should be to use.

If I had to execute that task today, I would approach the scenario in the same way — by starting small. Here’s how you can emulate my approach:

• Invest 1 hour weekly, building relationships with your sales and customer success teams (if applicable). Alternatively spend one-hour weekly speaking to neutral people about your product.
• Join customer calls and sales pitches — or demo onboarding sessions.
• Partner with analytics to understand market/customer behavioral insights and your Ideal Customer Profile.
• Learn how your product actually reaches your customers and serves your market and the various ways it solves their problems.

Developing Your Product Sense

I can tell you that product sense is not bestowed — it is earned through consistent immersion with customers’ pain points and market realities. Every customer conversation and piece of market research subconsciously adds to your knowledge base. Your decision-making prowess largely depends on how much Alpha you have been able to amass over time. Here are some actionable steps I use till date to sharpen my product and customer sense:

1. Every week, I block 2 hours for research and customer engagement.
2. I then reserve 30 minutes after each call for action items and reflection.
3. I sit with my designers to learn and affirm my trust in them to use established patterns for standard features.
4. I assess meetings that are high leverage or not. (Did you know your tech lead can handle sprint grooming without you?).
5. I focus on building alliances with my business counterparts to balance crucial customer touch points and revenue targets.
6. Because time is limited, I partner with the research teams to make every 30-minute customer call count with clear objectives on the most important interactions.
7. I obsessively read the company’s enterprise-wide newsletters about competition to decode market insights.
8. I do not care about tools. I start simple with Excel and my notepad; sophistication can come later.
9. I spend time to write extensively — my assumptions, questions, summaries — and I share them with my team to spark discussions.
10. Few years ago, I started the habit of documenting my thoughts about what I am building. Doing this will help build your confidence when engaging with colleagues and position you to always have a fresh perspective about your product. It should be a critically honest doc that helps you build conviction.

As you implement these practices, people will have more questions — some of which you might not have answers to. This is a good sign — it means you’re growing. Address each challenge as it comes, but keep moving forward. This is how great product managers are formed.

True product management is not about managing tasks — it’s about understanding markets, solving real-life problems, communicating with extreme clarity, doing the most important things and driving business value.

Everything else is just noise.