Jaya Manocha’s Post

Sins of product managers 👇 3️⃣ Says “no” to half the roadmap ideas. Because how dare a PM protect team bandwidth and focus? Sharam kar yaar, feature toh malik ke favorite ne suggest kiya tha. 2️⃣ Spends time understanding tech debt. Imagine wasting hours with engineer, when you could just be making shiny slides and saying 𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐲 in meetings. 😌 1️⃣ Doesn’t chase Jira tickets like Pokémon. Because clearly, if it’s not moving to Done every hour, they’re not 𝐝𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 🙄 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲: If you’re not irritating at least 1 person per sprint are you even PM-ing right? Let's grow and learn together, Jaya Manocha☘️ #ProductManagement #BeyoundTheObvious #TogtherWithJaya

Most prioritisation frameworks teach Product managers to assess a feature’s importance and business impact. Sounds reasonable… until every client says that their feature is both important and urgent. If you’re building an internal product, there’s usually a way out: you can cross-check with business goals and co-prioritise features with the relevant stakeholders. But what if your product is external, or you can't access general company priorities directly? You can’t verify or compare them objectively. Suddenly, your backlog becomes a mountain of “critical” requests, while your dev team still has limited capacity. What then? You could try making the backlog more transparent and involve clients in the prioritisation discussions. Will it make things worse, with every non-priority item finding its defender, and the smallest feature becoming someone's deal breaker? So what if we gamified it instead? Imagine giving each client an annual set of tokens – scaled with contract size – to vote for the features they want most. They can put all their tokens on one or spread them across many. Would that help create a more balanced and fair prioritisation process – or just formalise the power imbalance between big and small clients? There’s no perfect answer. But maybe it’s time we experiment with how we listen to our users — not only what they say is urgent, but what they’re truly willing to “spend” on. P.S. featuring my favourite pastry set from Belgrade, which I totally refuse to prioritise!🥐

The other day I was talking with a friend about how Product Managers are constantly asked to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing. Especially when things don’t go as planned. You can use any prioritization framework you like: effort vs. impact, RICE, WSJF, or your own version of it. But once you prioritize, it’s crucial to share the reasoning behind your choices with your closest stakeholders and the team. Having this documented helps later too. For example, when you need to give visibility into why you’re saying no to a new idea or request. But here’s something important to remember: prioritizing isn’t enough. When you and your team commit to delivering something, like project X or a new feature, it’s essential that expectations are crystal clear to everyone. Let’s say one of your goals is to expand the offer. One stakeholder might think it means targeting new users. Another might assume it’s about increasing adoption among existing customers. Whether that decision has been made or not, it must be clarified so everyone stays aligned and can move forward together. In moments like these, a clear definition of done (DoD), good documentation, and above all, transparency, make all the difference. How do you make sure expectations stay aligned in your team?

We don’t need more Product Owners. We need fewer of them. 𝐁𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 - 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬. Over the years, “Product Owner” became the corporate placebo for “we’re doing agile.” But somewhere along the way, we confused ticket ownership with business ownership. We hired armies of Product Owners who mastered Scrum ceremonies… but lost sight of outcomes. I’ve seen companies with dozens of POs and not a single person who could explain the P&L. AI will soon write user stories, manage backlogs, and even run sprint reviews. But it won’t make the hard call on what actually matters. That’s the job of a Product Manager. 𝐀 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐧𝐞. 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐣𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐱𝐭, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞. If you’re a Product Owner today, stop owning tickets. Start owning the outcome. The future doesn’t need more Product Owners. It needs Product Leaders.

Marcel Semmler like always likeminded 👍💪I remember the scrum framework actually did intend to make PO own the product and act as end2end PM and be the new PM - by making former PMs agile. What happend is what you described: it ended in the secretary’s the backlog work. As those who started to become POs ONLY learned PO in the SCRUM but never learned PM work. Not their fault but abused by the tousands who claim to be a PM. I feel the pain. We from Arise GmbH send only our Sen PMs to our customers BUT customers don’t always want a PM! Why?? Becuse either they don’t understand the difference and say: „Hey we just implemented scrum and PO a few years ago. We run fine“. Which they don’t. Or they do, but the whole organization was set up to run like this. All other related work is done by business. We advocate: PO should be replaced by PMs. They must be capable and engaged to do research, competitor analysis, biz case calculations, risk management, and even delivery and operation aspects of their products. They must OWN that. And that’s a different skill set. #ARISEREALPRODUCTMANAGEMENT #productownerdontown #letschangethattogether

✨ Day 29: 30 Days of Product Management ✨ One of the easiest ways to delay a product launch is by overlooking or forgetting a stakeholder(s) who should have been involved earlier. As a PM, it is important to ensure that all relevant stakeholders are aligned as early as possible. Aligning only with the tech team is not enough. Functions like compliance, support, finance, and marketing often influence launch readiness. Forgetting to loop them in early can create avoidable roadblocks later. How to take stakeholders along and avoid delays: 🗺 Map everyone early — At the start, identify every function that could influence the launch. 📌 Prioritize their involvement — Some need deep involvement, others just visibility. Clarify who must review, who should be informed, and who only needs updates. 📣 Tailor communication — Share updates in ways that make sense for each group. 🕒 Set up check-ins — Regular touchpoints (ops reviews, compliance checkpoints, support alignment calls, etc.) prevent last-minute surprises. The more aligned your stakeholders are, the smoother your launches will be. #day29 #30daysofproductmanagement #productmanager #productmanagement #buildinpublic #pmjourney

In many product management efforts, #focus is an often poorly understood technique and even much less rigorously applied when the project is gone beyond 50% completion. At that stage of completion, the product manager begins to juggle many balls in the form of trade-offs, new critical asks, broken tests, regression issues, tight launch timelines etc. What to do: 1. Always #focus. Re-centre the entire team on the OKRs. 2. Actively listen to all stakeholders - marketing, sales, dev, testing, QA & the client etc 3. Demonstrate empathy but be firm about realistic commitments viewed from the lens and delicate balance between value to client and revenue for stakeholders. 4. Park what needs to be parked for delivery post go-live. 5. Manage egos - never upset your client or an influential internal stakeholder. 6. Communicate clearly and often. That's it! Christopher Okwuraiwe Omotoyosi Odeyeyiwa Sam B. Lynda Ojokojo NDUBUISI OFOEGBU Albert iloh olushola oyalana Ruth Ademuyiwa Joshua Akpobome Azeez Otukoya Chisom Chukwu Daniel Fasanmi Ngozi Ewemie #focus

Post 2: More hard truth about Product Management as one post isn't enough to capture the chaos of PM life. 6/ Your users don't care about your KPIs. They only care about their problems. 7/ Half of your job is convincing people who don't report to you... to still listen to you. 8/ Getting bugs fixed won't get you noticed. Creating them might does. 9/ Most documentation? PRD etc... Read by two people ... you, and future you. 10/ PM life looks like ownership. Feels like accountability. And runs on ambiguity. What do you think? 👀 #productmanagement

I used to think being a great Product Manager was about having the perfect roadmap, the most detailed specs, and anticipating every risk. Well.. Should I say I was wrong? The most important tool in my kit isn't in Jira or a planning doc. It’s listening. Not just in meetings. But to the silence, too. The pause after you ask, "Is everything on track?" The slight hesitation when someone says a task is "almost done." The unspoken frustration in a quick, clipped message. These are the real status updates. The ones that never make it into a dashboard. So the biggest lessons haven't come from post-mortems or retrospectives. They’ve come from the 1:1 coffee chat where a developer finally felt safe to say, "This will actually take three weeks, not one," or the designer who quietly shared a wild idea that completely changed our feature. Being a Product Manager is about being a connector of dots — not just between tasks, but also between people. For me, it’s about creating the psychological safety for your team to tell you the truth before it becomes a problem. The best and the hardest product we build is trust. Isn't it? #SoftSkills #ProductManagement

After spending past few years in Product Management, I think I am in a position to SAY OUT LOUD some pain points that we face and how I have been trying to get around them. Product Manager / Owner Pain-point - #1 When requirements keep changing mid-sprint… 😰 You’re halfway through a sprint. The team is deep in flow. And then a stakeholder drops a “quick change” that’s suddenly “critical.” Sound familiar? In those moments, the sprint board starts to look less like a plan and more like a battlefield. The dev team gets frustrated, priorities blur, and what was once a clear sprint goal dissolves into chaos. As a PO/PM, you cannot just say "NO" and SLAM THE DOOR. But saying "YES" to everything is a sneaky destroyer of delivery and trust. And to be honest, we do so in our initial days( I have done that), but some continue to do that forever. Any request that arrives during the middle of a sprint gets captured and goes into the Product Backlog, but is not immediately acted upon if it is not CRITICAL or 9-1-1. Now you would say, - but for stakeholders, everything is CRITICAL, how to manage that? The thing that worked for me was to implement a straightforward ritual that I included later on. I showed them the real impact of mid-sprint changes — velocity drops, rework hours, broken promises, and delay in product/project delivery. I also started holding regular priority alignment sessions with stakeholders. So if something does have to jump the queue, it occurs transparently — and everyone sees what gets bumped, and I explain to my team 'The Why'. Slowly, they started to honor the process. The team got back on track. Delivery became more reliable. Gamechanger!!! Clear boundaries don't drive people away. They create trust. I would love to know how you got out of such situations. #ProductManagement #Agile #Scrum #ProductOwner #Leadership #StakeholderEngagement #PainPoint