Product management is facing a quiet crisis. Across startups and established tech companies alike, the role that once drove innovation has devolved into a coordination function where the loudest voice wins and conviction gets replaced by consensus.
The Economic Cost of Weak Product Leadership
This shift has real economic implications. Companies burn capital on feature factories that produce bloated, unfocused products. Engineering teams waste months building capabilities that get minimal adoption.
Customer acquisition costs rise because products lack clear differentiation. User retention suffers when experiences feel disjointed and over-complicated.
When product managers become order-takers rather than strategic leaders, companies ship faster but build worse. They respond to every stakeholder demand, every competitor feature, every customer request, and end up with software that tries to be everything and excels at nothing.
The rare products that break through share a common thread. They’re ruthlessly focused. They solve specific problems exceptionally well. They say no far more often than yes.
Behind each one sits a product leader who understood that their job wasn’t to keep everyone happy, but to keep the user experience coherent.
How The Role Changed
As product management professionalized, it accumulated process. The role became more about facilitation than vision, coordinating between engineering, design, sales, and leadership rather than driving toward a clear product philosophy.
Cross-functional collaboration morphed into something else entirely. Product managers started treating every input as equally valid. Engineering constraints, sales objections, executive opinions, and customer requests all carried the same weight. The PM became a human voting system, tallying preferences rather than making calls.
Consider a typical product planning cycle. Sales reports losing a deal because a competitor offers a specific feature. That feature lands on the roadmap. A major customer threatens to churn unless their custom workflow gets built. That gets prioritized. Leadership sees a competitor’s demo and panics. Everything gets reshuffled.
Six months later, the team has shipped a dozen features. Few get meaningful usage. The product feels cluttered. New users struggle to understand the value proposition. This isn’t collaboration. It’s abdication.
The Feature Factory Problem
In a mid sized SaaS company, they might be able to ship fifteen features per quarter, thus responding diligently to every stakeholder’s need.
And at the same time, they could have usage data that reveals that 70% of their features serve less than 5% of the actual users.
The core workflows that drive value remain buried under optional capabilities that most people never touch.
Users recognize when a product lacks coherence. They feel the cognitive load of navigating bloated interfaces.
Some companies claim that they’re being customer-centric by building everything customers ask for.
However, real customer-centricity means having a good understanding of what the users need even when they can’t clearly articulate.
This means protecting the experience from requests that would ultimately make the product worse.
What Real Product Leadership Requires
What problems really deserve to be solved, identifying the clearest path to solving it, these are the convictions product leaders start with.
A good example is product managers gets extensive feedback from different sectors.
The best product decisions often start with subtraction. What if we didn’t add that feature? What if we didn’t try to serve every use case equally well?
Product managers with clear vision disappoint people strategically. They tell executives that pet projects don’t align with product direction. They kill features that stakeholders love because those features don’t serve core user needs. They defend roadmaps even when it creates tension.
The Path Forward
Organizations should evaluate product managers on outcomes, not output. Stop celebrating how many features shipped. Start measuring whether the product is becoming more valuable and easier to use. Reward product leaders who have the courage to say no.
Leadership needs to accept that good product management creates tension. When a product manager pushes back on a request, that’s potentially a sign they’re doing their job.
Product managers themselves need to rebuild the muscle of conviction. Stop defaulting to consensus. Develop a point of view about what the product should become, more importantly they need to learn to make calls based on that vision, and not just when it’s convenient alone, even when it’s uncomfortable.
The alternative to this?
Well, that’s going to be a tech ecosystem filled up with products that lack direction, bloated, and that the customers themselves don’t care about.
More than just fancy titles, what the industry needs is product managers who are ready to lead again, experts that are ready to develop a conviction and ultimately stand to defend it.
The tech industry needs passionate and experienced industry experts who have a good understanding of their job, and are aware that their job isn’t just about making sure everyone is happy, but rather building products that solve real problems with clarity and focus.
About the writer:
Brian Omoruyi is a design-led product manager with experience building products across HR tech, fintech, logistics, and health, bringing creative problem-solving and strategic focus to product development.
