The Product Management Predicament: An Unspoken Dysfunction

PART 1

Sixteen Years, One Pattern

I’ve been working in what would be called the Product field in the UK for more than 16 years. In that time, I’ve been uniquely exposed to the working practices of a huge variety of businesses. Enterprise, start-up, scale-up, small business, e-commerce, SaaS, B2B, B2C, B2B2C, mostly all professing to be “product-led” organisations.

And yet, as someone who’s a compulsive thinker and problem-solver, I’ve been quietly haunted by the same dysfunction in Product Management across all of them. So repetitive and destructive has this dysfunction been that I’ve seriously considered walking away from Product altogether.

You mostly see it in non-tech-native businesses (companies that didn’t start as “tech” companies). But over time, I’ve come to realise it shows up in tech startups and enterprises too. Different badge. Same beast.

The Thing No One Talks About

My own school of Product traces back to the days of physical product management. Resources were scarce in the 00’s. So I pieced it together through an on-the-job Masters in Digital Marketing and Strategy, and from reading books on physical product lifecycle management during the dot-com era.

In all the organisations I worked in, there was always this thing. This problem. But no one ever really named it. Maybe they couldn’t see it. Maybe they couldn’t articulate it. Or maybe they stayed quiet for the same reason I eventually did, because calling it out could backfire.

But let’s call it what it is: most businesses I worked with weren’t doing Product Management properly. In some cases, not even close.

I know I can be blunt. I’ve always had a habit of pointing out truths when I see them. It’s got me in trouble before. But if you care about solving problems, I mean really solving them, then you need to be able to surface them first and face it head on. Anyone who’s run a retrospective knows this.

And yes, there’s a time and a place. But when things get totally illogical, sometimes saying it out loud is the only sane thing left to do.

“Product dysfunction is not a delivery issue, it’s a leadership issue.”

Dan Apps, Product Leader & Managing Director @ ARCANED

Why Now?

I’ve come to understand this problem more acutely over recent years. And if you trace it back through the history of how Product Management got adopted, from the dot-com boom to the current AI era, the roots are all there.

This piece is for anyone involved in Product Management. But if I’m honest, CEOs need to hear this the most. Product Managers, though, are the ones who’ll probably feel it resonate in their bones.

For me, this is a red pill / blue pill moment. Talking about it is going to ruffle feathers. An entire industry has sprung up around managing the symptoms of Product dysfunction — conferences, coaches, consultants, content... endless. But with AI on the rise and so many teams already exhausted, I think we’ve reached the point where we need to stop dancing around it and finally go after the root cause.

Where It All Started

Before the dot-com boom, Product Management was niche. It mostly lived inside FMCG companies or manufacturers of complex physical goods like cars. It was a job with serious responsibility.

You had to identify a market, shape the product, build it, launch it, improve it, retire it. You worked with specialists to get the pricing, positioning, and design right. If the product failed, it was on you. You were an extension of the CEO. That’s where the term “CEO of the Product” actually comes from, and back then, it meant something.

When software development picked up in the 90s, tech companies quickly realised they needed someone to take responsibility for the success of the new digital services they were building. Competition was heating up. Speed to market was everything. Agile began to take off. The role of “Product Owner” was referenced in the Agile Manifesto, and with that, the shape of modern Product Management started to emerge.

Most people didn’t even hear the term “Product Manager” until the 2010s. But in a few forward-thinking tech-native firms in the 2000s, the role was being refined, slowly and quietly, for the digital space.

I was there for it. I watched it all unfold. As the internet became a revenue stream, companies rushed to build digital products, mostly web applications and early SaaS platforms.

How It Scaled (And Why It Broke)

In those early days, universities were adjusting their IT courses to include more software development. A stream of educated engineers started entering the market, small by today’s standards, but growing.

Most businesses still didn’t have the in-house capability, so they relied on third parties to build. But this quickly became expensive. So the next move was obvious: bring more engineers in-house.

At that point, I made my move from project management into what we’d now call a Product role. I was essentially a business person firing off requests to tech, who’d disappear for a bit, then come back with the first version for testing.

It worked fine for small stuff. But as the work got more complex, the cracks showed.

Businesses started experiencing delays, missed outcomes, and rising costs. ROI was falling. So they looked for answers. They brought in consultants. They read books. And they discovered something: the Product Management function inside tech-native firms looked a lot more mature than their own.

So they started hiring Product Managers.

That’s when the real dysfunction began.

The Turning Point

Now, I’m not saying every non-tech-native business suffers from what I’m about to describe. They vary in degree, and every organisation is different. But the pattern is remarkably consistent.

There weren’t many Product Managers in the market. And more importantly, there was no formal qualification or educational pipeline. In tech-native companies, PMs were expensive, and rightly so. Their skills were rare and valuable. They blended business, tech, and customer understanding in a way few others could.

The businesses who could afford it put up job ads with big salaries. Sound familiar? You’re seeing the same thing now with AI roles.

Eventually, demand outpaced supply. So companies — especially slower, older ones — began hiring less experienced candidates at inflated salaries. And people took advantage. Some saw a chance to step into a highly paid role without needing a degree. And businesses, desperate to keep up, started accepting and running with it.

This led to a very visible outcome: inexperienced Product Managers struggling to deliver. Senior leadership took note. A perception formed, one that still persists in many places:​ "Product Managers are expensive, but they don’t really add value."

That perception caused even more damage.

Because when the first wave of Product Managers entered these businesses, they were rarely supported by proper Product Leaders. There was no precedent. No formal training path. So companies improvised: they put managers over Product Managers — managers who’d never been Product Managers themselves.

And that’s the real root cause of the dysfunction we’re still dealing with today.

PART 2

What Went Unnoticed (Until It Was Too Late)

At the time, it didn’t look like a problem. But with hindsight — and after being the first Product hire during multiple digital transformations, it’s obvious: Product Management isn’t just a role or a department, it’s a mindset. And the whole business needs to adopt it.

The issue is, these newly appointed Product “leaders”, most of them with zero Product experience, kept doing what they knew: top-down delivery management. Business cases, waterfall timelines, detailed specs. That’s how they got things done in the past, and it had worked well, in a pre-digital world.

What they didn’t realise was that by bringing tech in-house, they weren’t just building software, they were stepping into a whole new operating model. But they didn’t change the way they thought, or the way they led.

So, they imposed legacy ways of working. And Product Managers, many of them new to the craft and trying to do the right thing, were told to “just deliver the roadmap.”

No problem-solving. No discovery. No strategy. Just deliver.

This didn’t just disempower Product Managers, it actively confused them. They’d read the books. They’d followed the principles. But the reality of their day job bore no resemblance to actual Product Management.

Two Missing Skills That Matter More Than Anything

This leads to two big challenges that show up again and again.

1. No mentorship.​

New Product Managers have no one guiding them, no one helping them grow. Mistakes get magnified. Business leaders see this and say, “We pay these people a lot. Why are they still getting it wrong?” And the inexperienced leader above them shrugs and passes the blame.

But what those business leaders often miss is the setup. The PM was put into a complex, high-stakes role without support, guidance, or permission to actually do the job as it’s meant to be done.

2. Leadership gaps at the top.​

These Product Managers report to people who’ve never been Product Managers themselves, and that creates a blind spot.

There are two specific skills these leaders lack:

• Understanding delivery complexity. They don’t know what it really takes to build and evolve a digital product. They can’t see risk, don’t know how to navigate tech debt, and can’t course-correct when delivery starts wobbling.​
• Explaining the Product mindset to the rest of the business. They don’t know how to bring stakeholders along with them. They don’t know how to coach the commercial team out of feature requests, or help Finance understand why OKRs matter more than deadlines.​

So the dysfunction continues. Stakeholders work in silos. Product becomes the dumping ground for everyone’s unmet expectations. And Product Managers are left trying to mop up the mess.

The Consequences Add Up

I’ve seen large-scale delivery failures that were completely preventable, and in every case, the same story played out. A failure to follow Product methodology. A leadership team still stuck in delivery mode. Product Managers not set up to succeed.

The tragedy is that Product done well is one of the most powerful levers a business has. It can help you build what matters, adapt quickly, and deliver real customer value.

But that only works if the organisation actually lets it.

And the core issue is still this: many people leading Product today have never done Product themselves. They’re winging it. Some have read books or attended a one-day course. A few can talk the talk. But most still don’t understand what good looks like, let alone how to teach it.

Some outsource the problem to coaches, which is telling. Others distance themselves entirely. In the worst cases, they blame their product teams and start micro-managing them to regain control.

What Real Change Takes

The leaders who do want to get this right need a kind of “back-to-the-floor” education. They need to spend time in the trenches. Understand what the role actually involves. Learn what good looks like from the inside out.

That takes humility. And time. Because you can’t learn this in a classroom. Product is a practice. You have to live it.

To be clear: this isn’t about pointing fingers. Most of these leaders are trying their best. But they’ve inherited a system that set them up to operate in self-preservation mode. And over time, that system has become damaging, to people, to teams, and to businesses.

No Benchmark, No Accountability

A big part of the problem is there’s no benchmark for Product capability. No widely accepted standard. No agreed baseline.

So what do people do? They copy tech-native companies, without realising those businesses weren’t built on legacy infrastructure, or encumbered by hybrid operating models. They had clean foundations. Most businesses don’t.

Product becomes a wild west. Everyone’s trying to figure out what “good” looks like through meet-ups, frameworks, fireside chats. It’s why we’ve got 300+ models floating around, all trying to solve the same basic confusion.

Meanwhile, a vacuum forms. And into that vacuum step unqualified coaches and consultants, selling transformations they’ve never lived through.

As a consultant myself, I spot them easily. So do experienced Product people. So do underqualified Product leaders, often by accident. But they still hire them. Because they don’t know what else to do.

And then the cycle continues. Inexperienced leaders surround themselves with inexperienced teams. Dunning-Kruger meets the Peter Principle. Everyone means well. But the function deteriorates.

Why I Care (And Why You Should Too)

There are a few reasons I’m writing this.

First, I’ve lived it. I’ve survived it. I’ve watched others burn out because of it. Talented, thoughtful people being blamed for problems they never had the power to fix.

Second, I genuinely believe this is fixable. I’ve seen Product work well. I’ve seen it transform businesses. But only when the right accountability is in place — and that starts at the very top.

The Real Fix (It’s Not a Framework)

It starts with the CEO.

• The CEO needs to understand Product Management well enough to hold Product Leaders to account.​
• Product Leaders need real experience, not just theory, and they need to be responsible for educating the rest of the leadership team.​
• Every senior stakeholder needs to understand how their function fits into a product operating model, and that takes years of repetition before it sticks.​

From there, mid-level managers carry the torch. They teach their teams. The organisation shifts. Not because of a playbook, but because of a shared understanding.

This is how trust is built. And eventually, it creates a working environment where Product Managers can be empowered, not just in name, but in reality.

Can Product Managers drive that change upward? No. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work. Hierarchy, misaligned incentives, and fear-based decision-making will always win. The shift has to come from above.

And Then There’s AI…

Here’s the scary bit.

AI is only going to make this dysfunction more obvious. When AI starts taking on repeatable tasks, and teams are still missing outcomes, someone’s going to ask the question:​

"Why do we need Product Managers at all?"

The truth is, AI will make good Product Managers 10x more effective. But it’ll expose weak practices and inexperience fast. That could shut the door on juniors. It could discourage career entrants. It could even cause the discipline to collapse under its own confusion.

We’re already on that path. The only way to course-correct is to fix the leadership issue, now.

What Needs to Change

If you’ve read this far, you probably recognise the dysfunction I’m talking about.

I’m not here to sell you a framework. I’m not here to preach a new model.

All I want is for people to start being honest, especially at the top.

• CEOs need to learn the function they rely on to create value.​
• Product Leaders need to stop pretending they know what they’ve never done.​
• Product Managers need to stop internalising blame for a system that’s broken by design.​

And the wider Product community? We need to stop dancing around the problem and start saying it clearly: Product dysfunction is not a delivery issue, it’s a leadership issue.