Contrarian Product Management Opinions | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about product management?
Answer:
Here are some genuinely unpopular (or at least contrarian) opinions about product management that tend to trigger strong reactions in the community:
- Roadmaps are mostly theater. Most detailed, date-based roadmaps are fiction created to appease stakeholders and HiPPOs. Real product work is continuous discovery and delivery; committing to features quarters out is a recipe for building the wrong thing.
- Customer feedback is overrated. The majority of customer requests are noise, not signal. Customers are great at describing their problems but terrible at prescribing solutions. Relying too heavily on vocal users or support tickets leads to feature bloat and a mediocre product for the majority.
- Product managers shouldn’t write PRDs anymore. Long, speculative product requirements documents are a relic of waterfall thinking. In 2025, a good PM communicates intent through lightweight opportunity solution trees, user stories, and prototypes—not 20-page specs no one reads.
- MVP is one of the most misused and harmful concepts in product. Most “MVPs” are just half-baked products that confuse users and damage trust. You’re better off shipping a “Simple Lovable Complete” product to a tiny audience than a minimal, barely usable one to everyone.
- Designers and engineers often make better product decisions than dedicated PMs. Many of the best products (Basecamp, Superhuman, Linear, Arc) were built without traditional product managers. A strong founding team or empowered designers/engineers frequently outpace the classic “mini-CEO” PM model.
- Jira is anti-product. Heavy process tools like Jira encourage output theater (velocity, story points, burndown charts) instead of outcomes. Great teams ship fast with almost no formal ticketing system.
- Product management is mostly project management with fancier titles at big companies. In large organizations, many PMs spend their days in alignment meetings, writing updates, and herding cats—very little actual product thinking happens.
- OKRs are largely performative. Most companies set OKRs, roll them up, then quietly ignore them when reality hits. They rarely drive real behavior change and often create perverse incentives.
- Certification courses (CSPO, Pragmatic, etc.) are close to worthless. They teach process theater and buzzwords, not actual product judgment or taste. You learn product by shipping products that people love or (more often) failing painfully.
- “Data-driven” is often an excuse for cowardice. When faced with a hard strategic decision, hiding behind A/B tests or waiting for perfect data usually means you’re avoiding making a real call. Great PMs have convictions and use data to refine, not to decide.
These opinions tend to be unpopular because they challenge the dominant corporate product religion, the consulting industry that sells process, and a lot of people’s career identities. But they’re held (quietly) by many of the people who’ve built the most successful products of the last decade.