A couple of months ago I wrote about product discovery. It resonated because many of you recognised the same reality: days full with ‘doing the job’ while the real work never quite happens.
You’re not alone.
A coachee recently asked me:
“How do I stop writing stories and focus on discovery?”
So I asked her: “How do the other PMs at your company do it?”
She replied:
“It depends on the maturity of the team. I’m compensating for mine.”
That was an AHA moment, but not the kind of nice AHA. Because it highlights the gap we’ve created in how we define product roles. This PM was being held accountable for her team’s execution but not the product outcomes.
Is that really the best use of a PM? Is that the value the org needs?
PMs Are Decision-Makers, Not Delivery Operators
I recently chaired the Product Led Summit in Amsterdam for the Product-Led Alliance and had lots of inspiration and clarity from the talk given by Paolo Lacche called "Does your startup of scale-up need product managers?" The name was already thought provoking. My strong belief is that any company benefits from product thinking. I went to many of my early assignments with that perspective and got caught up in the "product management theatre", as Marty Cagan calls it. I wish I had Paolo's framework then to know to whom to say no.
Let's break it down. First, what is the product management function in Paolo's words?
“Product management is the company function accountable for product decisions, ensuring they result from team collaboration, fulfill customer needs, and achieve business objectives.”
That’s the job. Not Jira tickets. Not grooming backlogs. But owning the key decisions that determine whether the business succeeds.
We’ve spent years teaching PMs how to write epics and estimate velocity. It’s time we teach them how to make calls.
Why the Role Gets Distorted
Most PMs don’t write job descriptions for themselves. Their role is shaped by:
- An org that values shipping over learning.
- Teams that need babysitting instead of shared ownership.
- Leadership that pushes down requests and pulls up status.
PMs end up managing rituals, JIRA and having to be on call for any production issue. The more structured the org, the less thinking the PM is allowed to do. I have seen this pattern in companies of all sizes, so scale is not the only culprit. We tend to blame ourselves for talking too much product jargon and not meeting our stakeholders where they are. But wouldn't some clarity help both the org and the product professionals? What if we had 3 questions to get that clarity on the table and start building from the same level of agreement? Here is where Paolo Lacche 's framework gets very handy:
- CLARITY - Are PM's accountable for product decisions?
- WILLIGNESS - Do you need help with product decisions?
- ABILITY - Can you trust your product teams to make decisions?
If you can answer YES to all three questions, voilà, you need a product manager. But if not, you have asked for a type of perspective that will create friction instead of results, and you will blame it to the product model not working.
What Should Change: Rewriting the Role
Here’s what I think needs to shift, starting with how we define the PM role inside teams.
Product Managers own decisions
Give PMs clarity on which decisions are theirs to make and support them in making fewer, more strategic calls. PMs should not be the interface to the backlog. They should be the voice of outcomes. Their backlog work is to prioritize it. Slicing, describing, creating labels, filters, etc. any JIRA user can do. The team does what it works for them to manage the technical execution.
Analysts are the first lever to scale
You don’t need one PM per team. A seasoned PM can lead across 3–5 teams with product analysts and business analysts feeding the engine. If you structure your team around discovery and autonomy, PMs don’t scale with delivery, they scale with insight and value based prioritization.
We need to redefine incentives
PMs are still evaluated on velocity and on-time delivery. Some of my traumatized coaching clients are tracked on the number of user stories. But what if we tracked:
- The quality of their decision frameworks
- The clarity of problem statements
- The business impact of their bets?
When we change what we measure, we change how PMs show up.
Final Thought
Your team doesn’t need a product manager spending all day writing user stories in Jira. They need a product manager who makes sense of uncertainty, connects the dots across business, tech, and customers, and pushes decisions forward with confidence.
Good product management is about product leadership: creating clarity when things are messy, guiding teams through digital transformation, and making choices that shape outcomes.
Strong product managers balance discovery with delivery, strategy with execution. They translate complexity into focus, align stakeholders, and make sure the product team is solving the right problems; not just shipping features.
So no, it’s not about “doing less.” It’s about doing the job product managers are really hired to do.
