Leadership Creates the Conditions for Its Own Frustration

Something I’ve realized over the years is that executives frequently express a shared set of frustrations regarding their product teams. The complaints are predictable: “They don’t think like owners.” “They lack strategic vision.” “They cannot scale.” When these symptoms manifest, the fallout is severe. Roadmaps become optimized for low-impact feature engagement rather than core business revenue. Strategic initiatives stall out in perpetual cycles of analysis paralysis, and the product organization systematically loses its credibility with finance.

However, after running Product People and advising on dozens of interim and transformation missions across both B2B and B2C industries, I have observed a consistent pattern: the frustration executives express about product teams is almost always a condition leadership built themselves, and rarely recognize as self-inflicted.

To fix the product organization, executives must first examine the systemic flaws they introduce into their onboarding, priority-setting, and hiring frameworks.

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The Myth of the First 90 Days

The standard industry convention dictates that a new Product Manager requires a 90-day window to onboard. This assumption is a structural mistake that creates misaligned incentives and delays business impact.

When you hand a PM a three-month buffer, you incentivize busy work over impactful work. The PM spends 91 days attempting to learn every granular metric, interviewing every stakeholder for introductory coffee chats, and building a fully comprehensive view of the entire product ecosystem. This spreads their focus thin over highly unimportant details and distances them from their core purpose: delivering business outcomes.

A product manager does not need to understand every single interface detail to be useful. They need to understand how their specific responsibility area connects to others, identify the highest immediate points of friction, and execute.

At Product People, our benchmark for onboarding is two weeks. A PM should start delivering value within their first two sprints. We achieve this through two clear vectors:

• Granular Goal Alignment: Narrowing down exactly what must be achieved over the next sprint to move a specific KPI.
• Operational Pain Elevation: Identifying where the current delivery engine is broken (whether that is unorganized documentation, poor team topology, or workflow friction) and fixing it immediately.

Starting from immediate impact, rather than exhaustive analysis, preserves a PM's initial motivation and builds early institutional credibility.

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Why Executives Waste Engineering Capacity on 10 OKRs

Leadership teams frequently paralyze their own product managers by overloading them with conflicting priorities, then wonder why those same PMs lack strategic vision.

I recently supervised an engagement with a mobility solutions provider where our team stepped in to cover a PM absence during an intense quarterly planning phase. The executive leadership spent weeks discussing long-term, 12-month strategic roadmaps and complex cross-team alignments.

On the ground, however, the engineering team was in complete organizational chaos. They were drowning in an overflowing, outdated backlog. Worse, the team had roughly 10 disconnected Key Results (KRs) they were expected to push simultaneously. Every single sprint was a disjointed struggle because there was no clear operational priority.

Instead of focusing on the 12-month slide deck, we spent the first week cleaning the backlog, stripping out irrelevant tasks, and streamlining the focus for the next two sprints. Once the team had a happy, organized delivery pipeline, the operational pressure subsided. Only then did the space open up to execute the broader corporate strategy. If you do not fix the operational engine first, your strategy remains purely theoretical.

Why do executives default to the "10 OKRs" trap? Because true prioritization requires bravery.

A narrow, highly defined list of one or two priorities forces a leader to take absolute responsibility. If you bet on a single strategic direction and it fails, you must accept defeat and own the mistake. Spreading bets across 10 OKRs acts as a form of psychological risk-hedging. Because the company is always busy and delivering something, it creates a comforting illusion of high productivity. In reality, the business outcomes remain shallow because maximum effort was never concentrated on the highest-impact items.

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The Shiny Logo Bias: The Real Root of Early Churn

When a newly hired PM leaves or is let go within their first year, leadership almost always writes it off as a "bad hire" or a "poor culture fit." This is an intellectual shortcut.

The churn is indeed a hiring failure, but not because the interview process lacked technical rigor. It fails because leadership did not explicitly define the environmental conditions the PM would actually face versus what they put on the job description.

Early in the history of Product People, we made this mistake ourselves. We were occasionally blinded by shiny logos (candidates with resumes from world-renowned tech brands and extensive years of experience). We convinced ourselves that because they operated successfully within a highly visible company, they would automatically make our organization more productive.

This was a false assumption. Candidates from massive, highly structured tech brands are accustomed to operating within a well-oiled machine where processes are already manicured. When dropped into a chaotic, rapidly changing growth environment, they often became frustrated, lost, and unable to adapt.

We realized that for our specific model, **flexibility (**the ability to rapidly adjust to different operational structures, industries, and stakeholder personalities) is the single most critical trait. A pedigree from a famous brand cannot compensate for a lack of environmental compatibility.

To screen for this, we restructured our evaluation process. Our take-home assignments are deliberately left open-ended and loosely defined.

• Low-Flexibility Signals: Candidates who immediately return with a barrage of questions, asking us to define every single parameter and constraint before they begin. They are uncomfortable with ambiguity and want leadership to own the foundational decisions.
• High-Flexibility Signals: Candidates who accept the ambiguity, state their own baseline assumptions clearly, make independent decisions, and defend their logic during the interview.

If a candidate cannot navigate ambiguity in a mock assignment, they will inevitably fail when dropped into an unaligned product organization.

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The High Cost of Obsessive Consensus

A foundational best practice taught in product management is the necessity of extensive stakeholder alignment. PMs are instructed to spend weeks securing absolute consensus from Sales, Marketing, Legal, and Engineering before moving forward.

This obsession with universal consensus is deeply harmful to business velocity.

Seeking total buy-in is a luxury reserved almost exclusively for market monopolists or companies with dominant market shares that can afford to waste time in analysis paralysis. For growth-stage companies, startups, or businesses operating in highly competitive verticals, optimizing for consensus introduces an unacceptable level of delivery risk.

We must also recognize the cultural nuances at play here. Certain corporate cultures naturally prioritize collectivist agreement, while others lean heavily on hierarchical decision-making. The most efficient product organizations operate precisely in the middle.

Leadership must be willing to hear out the insights, data, and perspectives of their product teams, but they must ultimately possess the conviction to make a definitive decision and move forward.

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Conclusion: A Call to Leadership Action

If your product team is failing to act like owners, stop looking at their individual capabilities and start looking at the environment you have designed for them.

Are you suffocating them with a 90-day buffer of busywork instead of demanding immediate impact? Are you hedging your own strategic risks by burying them under 10 unprioritized OKRs? Are you hiring for prestigious logos rather than the specific psychological flexibility your current stage of growth requires?

Ownership is not a trait you simply hire; it is an operational condition you allow to exist. To scale your product organization, strip away the safety blankets of excessive consensus and fractured priorities. Give your teams fewer targets, clearer boundaries, and the autonomy to execute with velocity.

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