Product Management Isn’t Broken—It’s Just Misunderstood!

A Response to Clickbait Published by PostHog

Last week, my colleague Mareike Bonitz and I read a blog post titled “Product Management Is Broken”—Although the title was designed to grab attention and spark debate, the author highlights important points about the challenges within product management. However, the truth is: Product management isn’t broken—it’s just often misunderstood.

Here’s the thing: good product management isn’t glamorous. It’s not about dictating roadmaps or writing “perfect user stories.” It’s about collaboration, communication, and navigating complex systems while making sure everyone—design, engineering, and leadership—is aligned on delivering user value.

Let me tell you about my moment of the week that perfectly illustrates this.

When Progress Outshines Promises

Our CFO Nicolai Alexander Troensegaard approached me with a concern: a recurring issue affecting a portion of our customers and contributing to annual losses. He’d heard I was “going to fix it.”

I took a step back and replied, “I can’t give you a black-and-white promise, but here’s what I can share.” I opened our product discovery workspace and walked him through our strategy:

• A deep understanding of the domain and its core pain points
• Specific, high-impact opportunities
• Known risks and potential blockers
• Unfiltered feedback from customers

Then, I shared something that rarely leaves the product team’s walls: our preliminary plan for testing and improving solutions step by step. I explained that building a fully custom solution to completely solve the issue and maintain it long term—would likely be cost-prohibitive. Instead, we prioritized scalable solutions designed to solve this challenge and future ones across the product.

This wasn’t a “mic drop” moment—it was a reality check. This is what product management really is.

We don’t just chase problems or deliver quick fixes. We help organize the team by driving discussions around evaluating viability, feasibility, and desirability, balancing trade-offs, and steering progress.

The Myth of “Product Management Is Broken”

Let’s address the real issue behind the clickbait headline. Often, when people claim product management is broken, it’s because they’ve experienced environments where product managers do operate as bottlenecks or task managers. To be fair, we’ve all seen this happen. And when product management is reduced to backlog grooming or status updates, engineers—and the entire product—suffer.

The PostHog article makes some great observations about this. As the author, ?? james hawkins points out, engineers thrive when they have ownership, autonomy, and the ability to drive meaningful product decisions. I couldn’t agree more. But here’s the catch: product management done right already supports this.

Good product managers don’t block engineers. We involve engineering and design from the start. We collaborate on solutions, not just tasks. We recognize that the product isn’t just “ours”—it’s a team effort with shared ownership and accountability.

Why Vision Is More Important Than Tickets

One of the main arguments in the blog post was that product managers often “over-manage” and get bogged down in task management tools. The author suggested that companies would be better off if engineers had more freedom to build solutions directly, without PMs acting as bottlenecks.

The truth is: We’re on the same team. Engineers should absolutely have the context, freedom, and trust to drive innovation. But freedom without vision or user insights is just guesswork. And as the PostHog article notes, without accountability, you’re at risk of chaos. This is where collaboration—not control—comes in.

Instead of viewing product managers as gatekeepers, we should see them as connectors—enabling engineering and design to make decisions with full visibility of user needs, business goals, and technical constraints. When we create shared vision and empower engineers with context, we stop managing tasks and start building products that matter.

My recent example highlighted this team effort perfectly.

While exploring insights gathered from users and cross-functional teams, our lead engineer and product designer worked alongside me to review all the opportunities on the table while identifying and managing potential technical risks. Together, we identified what could be built incrementally and how to validate its impact step by step.

Because engineering had a voice in discovery, we avoided blindly chasing the white rabbit and instead focused on solutions with impact.

That’s the power of collaboration. It’s not about “managing” engineers—it’s about mutual enablement and shared success.

It’s Not About Control—It’s About Coordination

If I could give the author of that clickbait blog post one piece of advice, it would be this:

You don’t have to love product managers, but you do have to appreciate what they enable.

Let’s be real: The “people building products in their parents’ garages” don’t need a product management team. But in the real world—where products involve legal compliance, complex data pipelines, UX research, and cross-functional teams—you need someone who can do the dance.

That dance is what separates the amateurs from the pros.

A product manager isn’t there to control everything. We’re there to balance user needs, business viability, and technical feasibility.

We’re there to provide clarity when chaos threatens to take over.

Product Management Done Right

The real takeaway here isn’t that product management is perfect. It’s that when done right, it becomes the invisible thread that holds the team together.

If you’ve experienced bad product management, I understand your frustration. But if you’ve ever been part of a team where things just clicked, there’s a good chance you had a great product manager quietly orchestrating that success.

As for me, I’ll keep having conversations like the one with our CFO, helping drive progress—not with promises, but with meaningful outcomes.

Product management isn’t broken—but clickbait articles only fuel the stereotypes holding it back.