Rethinking Product Management: 5 Practices to Abandon for Success

Most product managers obsess over what to start doing: new frameworks, new tools, new rituals. But real leverage often comes from what you stop. Dropping dead weight creates focus. Abandoning dogma creates clarity.

The hardest part? Many of the practices we need to quit once made us successful. But clinging to them in 2026 can hold us back.

Let’s talk about the five sacred cows of product management and why it’s time to move on.

Marty Cagan’s Inspired is a bible for PMs. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of us don’t work at Google, Amazon, or Netflix. His principles, while brilliant, assume orgs with elite design talent, massive data, and leadership buy-in.

💡 Story: I once tried to roll out a “Cagan-style” discovery process at a 30-person startup. It tanked. Why? We didn’t have the UX maturity to run dual-track discovery at scale. We needed leaner, messier methods.

👉 Do instead: Use Cagan’s principles as guardrails, not gospel. Blend them with context-specific hacks. Pragmatism > purity.

PowerPoints are seductive: beautiful, colourful, and mostly useless. They make you look smart, but rarely make better decisions.

💡 Stat: A 2023 McKinsey survey showed 65% of managers admitted they skim slides without retaining the decisions behind them.

Amazon’s six-page memo culture works because it forces PMs to think deeply, argue logically, and surface trade-offs. A well-crafted Product Requirements Doc (PRD) or narrative memo beats a flashy deck every time.

👉 Do instead: Replace decks with structured writing. Try the Pyramid Principle: lead with the answer, then layer in reasoning.

We’ve all been there: a leader pushes a roadmap item you know is garbage. You “disagree and commit” because it feels political.

💡 Story: At one company, a PM quietly committed to a top-down idea they didn’t believe in. Six months later, the feature flopped. In the retro, the PM admitted they saw it coming but stayed silent. Leadership lost trust—not because the feature failed, but because the PM hadn’t spoken up.

👉 Do instead: Be the respectful contrarian. Challenge assumptions with data. Frame it as saving time, money, and reputation—not just being difficult.

Too many PMs treat the backlog as a personal treasure chest. The result? A black box nobody trusts.

💡 Stat: Teams that co-manage backlogs report 30% higher satisfaction and 25% faster iteration cycles (Agile Alliance, 2024).

Your engineers and designers often have sharper instincts about technical debt or UX friction than you do. When they co-own the backlog, they co-own the outcomes.

👉 Do instead: Run backlog grooming sessions as collaborative workshops. Empower the team to shape priorities—ownership scales morale.

Being “in every meeting” feels productive, but it isn’t. If you’re scheduling stand-ups, tracking tickets, and running retros, you’re not a PM—you’re an unpaid Scrum Master.

👉 Do instead: Step back. Focus on why and what. Trust your delivery team with the how. Your energy belongs on strategy, outcomes, and alignment.

Yes, read. But if your development budget is €2,000, don’t spend €500 on books and courses. Spend it on tools and data that give you leverage:

Knowledge is good. Validated learning is better.

If the last decade taught us anything, it’s that product management evolves fast. Looking ahead:

The PMs who adapt will thrive. Those who cling to old habits will fade.

The PMs who thrive aren’t those who memorise the most frameworks. They’re the ones who edit their craft ruthlessly.

Drop what no longer serves you: blind adherence to gurus, death by slides, fake alignment, backlog hoarding, and Scrum Master cosplay.

Because in product management, subtraction is a strategy.

🔥 Free Resource:
📂 Download the Stop Doing List for PMs (PDF) — print it, pin it, or share it with your team.

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