The PM Trap

Posted on LinkedIn. 643 impressions, 7 reactions. The “Stop Managing Your Product” essay as a personal confession.

The first thing I did when I went solo was set up a project management system.

Spent a solid afternoon on it. Board with columns. Tickets with acceptance criteria. Backlog prioritized by value. I felt disciplined. Professional. Like I was doing things the right way. Nobody was ever going to read any of it.

The board had an audience of one. The acceptance criteria existed so I could tell myself what I already knew. The backlog was a list of things I was already thinking about, written in a format designed for people who aren't me to understand what I want. There were no other people. I was performing product management for an empty room.

If you've worked as a PM, you have instincts that take years to develop. Decomposing work. Writing requirements. Prioritizing ruthlessly. Running ceremonies that keep teams in sync. Those instincts are real skills, and they're almost entirely useless when you're building alone. Not because the thinking is wrong. Because the artifacts exist to solve coordination problems. A PRD exists because an engineer who isn't you needs to understand what to build. A sprint board exists because eight people need to know who's doing what. You are one person. You have no coordination problem. You're fighting a disease you don't have with medicine that makes you drowsy.

The dangerous part is that it feels right. An engineer who's over-architecting knows, somewhere, that they're stalling. A designer on their fifteenth mockup iteration knows too. But a PM grooming a backlog? That feels like strategy. Leadership. Discipline. It has all the emotional texture of real work without any of the exposure to reality that real work requires.

The project management system isn't a tool. It's a security blanket. It provides the familiar shape of productivity without the unfamiliar discomfort of building something and finding out if anyone wants it.

Three bullets about what you're building. Then go build it. The rest is procrastination masquerading as productivity.

What I shipped: This post. And a link back to the playbook for anyone who recognized themselves in it.

What I learned:643 impressions is modest, but the reactions were from PMs. The people who felt it are exactly the audience. The voice is right — personal confession lands harder than advice.