Leave PMs alone!

When you're part of a good 1:1 product management community, it keeps you away from quietly losing your marbles.

One of the most common topics that surfaces is the time wasted managing expectations and stakeholders.

Ideas come from everywhere, and they are cheap!In a typical PM's workday, you spend juggling "urgent" and even "strategic" requests (people use this word when they can't justify the value).

Then, as a PM, you're trying to figure out what's actually a good idea to explore and which one you can park. Once you park it, you need to babysit the stakeholder and explain to them why this is a terrible idea without telling them this is a terrible idea. Sometimes they don't want to hear it, so it escalates.

Then you do that exploration again in a larger group, and it gets canned. Time wasted.

You could have spent that time chatting with a customer or reading up on the latest market trends.

Why does this happen? People think most of their ideas are groundbreaking and will make an impact. In reality, most of them are shit. The hit rate is pretty low; 20-30% of ideas are somewhat decent. 1-2% are the ones that can make an impact.

If PMs are left alone to do their job, be consistent, follow the process, and spot the patterns and problems, you'll succeed... The more shit ideas you throw at the PM, the slower they become, the less quality product is released. Leave PMs alone, please!