10 Dysfunctions of

Product Management
& How Productboard Can Help

Written in partnership with Prodify

Copyright © Productboard Inc. 2022 – All Rights Reserved

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“ Happy families are all alike;

every unhappy family is

unhappy in its own way.”

Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina

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Product management is a paradox.

Consider the following questions:

Does product management deliver outcomes for the business or the customer?
Is product management an art or a science?
Does product management succeed by setting the right priorities now or by planning farther ahead?
Should product managers be held fully accountable for results, or do they lack the necessary authority?

We could keep going with these kinds of questions, but the answer to all of them would still be
the same: both! That’s the inherent complexity of product management. It’s the reason so many
companies struggle to understand the role, and even the companies who “totally get it” end up
struggling anyway.

Over the past 8 years, Prodify has advised and coached more than 80 SaaS companies to help
them become more product-driven. As you might imagine, we’ve seen hard-working product
teams struggling all the time, even under the best of conditions. While there are many things
that can go wrong, we’ve identified the most common dysfunctions in product management
and named them so teams can talk about them openly in the hopes of addressing them.

If some of these seem familiar, then this is the ebook for you.

We’ll delve into each of these dysfunctions so you can see if they are representative of the
challenges you’re dealing with in your company. You may find you’ve experienced most or even
all of them at one time or another. Rest assured that doesn’t signal incompetence or imply your
product team is deficient or unskilled. On the contrary, these issues are so prevalent that
almost everyone who has worked in product management will have struggled with them at one
point or another. I certainly have, and I’m guilty of a few myself. As you read each of them, mark
which ones ring true at your company, and read on to see how Productboard can help you
address each one.

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 Overview: The 10 Dysfunctions of Product Management

THE HAMSTER WHEEL 2. THE COUNTING HOUSE 3. THE IVORY TOWER

A focus on output
An obsession with
A lack of

over outcomes internal metrics customer research

4. THE SCIENCE LAB 5. THE FEATURE FACTORY 6. THE BUSINESS SCHOOL

Optimization to the
An assembly line
The overuse of

exclusion of all else of features science and data

7. THE ROLLER COASTER 8. THE BRIDGE TO NOWHERE 9. THE NEGOTIATING TABLE

Fast-paced
Overengineering for
Trying to keep

twists and turns future unknowns everyone happy

10. THE THRONE ROOM

Whipsaw decision-making

from the person in charge

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About the Author
Rajesh Nerlikar is a Co-Founder and Principal Product Advisor/Coach at Prodify and

co-author of the best-selling product book, Build What Matters.

Rajesh has more than 16 years of product management experience. Over the past 4 years,

he’s advised and coached nearly 40 companies on product strategy, team development and
operations, from startup founders to growth stage product executives to entire enterprise
product teams.

Prior to Prodify, he was a technology consultant at Accenture, an entrepreneur, a product

manager at Opower, a senior product manager at HelloWallet, a director of product at
Morningstar, and the Interim Vice President of Product and Design at Savonix, a Prodify client.

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Dysfunction #1: The Hamster Wheel

— a focus on output over outcomes

On a hamster wheel, all that matters is continuing to run, even though you’re not getting
anywhere. Similarly, sometimes product teams are almost entirely focused on output —

hitting deadlines — with little regard for the outcome.

Compare these two questions and you’ll see the difference in perspective:

Did you ship that feature on time? (output-oriented)

Did that feature deliver value to customers and grow revenue? (outcome-oriented)

What’s the use of shipping a feature on time if no customer wants or is willing to pay for it?

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
To escape the hamster wheel, use Productboard to create an outcome-driven roadmap and
emphasize what metrics your proposed product changes are expected to move (rather than
just when the releases are planned). After the release, be sure to go back and measure whether
the changes delivered the expected outcomes. Then communicate the results to your team
and stakeholders, along with any recommendations on the next steps.

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Dysfunction #2: The Counting House

— an obsession with internal metrics

In the counting house, the focus is entirely on internal metrics with no regard for customer
success. Many product teams become obsessed with internal metrics like revenue growth,
monthly active users, and customer retention.

The truth is, most internal metrics are trailing indicators of a product’s success, and therefore
shouldn’t be the primary focus of product management.

It’s far better to answer the question, “How can we effectively deliver greater value to our
customers?” If you can answer that question and create a good business model around the
answer, your internal metrics will almost always follow suit.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
To ensure you never lose sight of your customer’s needs, create a hierarchy that emulates

how your customers would think about what you’re working on. For example, you could use

a Jobs-to-be-Done hierarchy to show how your work is helping users get different jobs done,
as seen in the example below.

Problems

 I need to set up a new employee

Hiring managers need to be able to extend offers

New employees need to be able to be ready to go on day 1

Selections need to be sent to provider systems

 I need to compensate my employees

Hiring managers need resources on salary bands

Employees must be able to choose their primary bank

Direct deposit needs to be set up

Time tools must be set in place

Summary of payment must be accessible in the UI

 I need to support my employees

 I need to administer my organization

You could also implement our concept of customer outcome pyramids by orienting your
hierarchy around metrics your customers would use to measure your product’s value, like
saving them time in completing a task or hitting a personal goal like losing weight or exercising
more. This may not feel natural, but going through the process of identifying the customer value
proposition for each feature in your existing product/on your roadmap can force you to see if
your product is helping customers achieve the outcomes they care about. If you can’t articulate
why a feature is valuable, it begs the question of whether it’s needed.

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Dysfunction #3: The Ivory Tower

— a lack of customer research

In the ivory tower, product teams become so removed and so far above the customers that
they start thinking they know their customers better than the customers know themselves.
Consequently, they never really talk to their customers, which means they risk building a
product no one wants or needs. This is one of the most common, and in my mind,

egregious, dysfunctions.

This can also lead to mistrust between product management and other departments.

Product management feels like they’re building the right product (though they may not be),

so when the product doesn’t perform well, they assume the fault lies elsewhere.

The ivory tower is a trap. Stay on the ground with your customers.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
There are quite a few features in Productboard to help you better understand your users:

Use the Insights board to link customer insights and feedback directly to the features 

you’re working on.

You can also collect feedback and ideas directly from users via the Portal.

You can further clarify who you’re targeting with your roadmap by segmenting your users
manually or based on the new Amplitude behavioral cohort integration (for example, 

find what power users are saying)

By using these features, anyone trying to understand your roadmap will be able to read what
customers actually said or what your team heard that led to the feature. Now it will be more
clear to stakeholders why you prioritized solving a specific customer problem and how the
solution factors in all the feedback received.

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Dysfunction #4: The Science Lab

— optimization to the exclusion of all else

In the science lab, product teams tend to focus all of their efforts on highly measurable yet
superficial improvements to their product. Collectively, these small-scale optimizations don’t
do much to innovate or add customer value.

For more and more companies, optimization has become the be-all and end-all rather than

a facet of a balanced product development roadmap. The assumption is that making

improvements to existing solutions is the one thing that will drive results, but even effective
optimizations can’t take the place of real innovation.

Sometimes you need new solutions, not optimizations.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
It’s important to balance your roadmap between innovation, iteration, and operation. We also
suggest you do a top-down allocation exercise to get stakeholders aligned on what percentage
of product development capacity should go towards each category. The ratios likely depend on
the product lifecycle stage. Early on, it’s mostly innovation, then mostly iteration as you seek
product/market fit, and then mostly operation as you scale your product.

3 CATEGORIES FOR ROADMAP BALANCING

1. INNOVATION New feature

Bold changes to make Overhauls to existing feature
leaps and bounds towards Architectural changes to
the customer journey vision support future end stat
Integrations with partners

2. ITERATION Conversion funnel

optimization
Incremental changes to the
A/B testin
existing product to deliver
additional customer & Small fixes that provide
incremental lift of a KP
business value
One-off feature requests or
enhancements

3. OPERATION Security/data privac

The cost of managing a Performance/up tim
modern SaaS product Technical debt/ pgrade
Internal tooling
Bug fixes

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Through Productboard, you can help visualize how much of your roadmap is going to each of

these three categories of work using swim lanes. See the example below:

Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3

Innovation Links to relevant bene fi

t sites Mobile h our submissions O ff er letter

Direct deposit Timecard tracking for contractors Employee Handbooks

Visualizations of payment and deductions

Iteration Select work devices Create a Contributor+ user role Embedded payroll

Select medical coverage Options API Ta x ed amount API

Operation
Allow SSO Select work apps U pgrade time tracking software

This visualization can help your roadmap audience:

Understand how much of a lift they can expect from different roadmap items (incremental for iteration,

step-wise for innovation).

Scan the roadmap artifact to quickly digest how much capacity is allocated to each category. That is,

if they see a lot of innovation cards, they’ll know we’re investing a lot in innovation.

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Dysfunction #5: The Feature Factory

— an assembly line of features

What does a feature factory build? Features.

When is a feature factory done building features? Never.

That’s the problem with being a feature factory: there’s always the next feature to build.

Product teams fall into this trap because they are led to believe by customers or internal
stakeholders that if they just had this one next feature, they will close incremental deals or

keep customers who might otherwise leave.

Sometimes, it works out that way, but more often than not, the team discovers that yet another
feature is also needed. At some point, you need to break the cycle.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
You have to create a reason to pause the factory and break the cycle. To do so, consider using
Productboard in a couple of different ways to take a breather and measure the impact of your
team’s work:

Use Insights to build a sustainable feedback loop so you can hear what users are saying
about the new features you’re building. Are they aware of the new feature? Do they
understand the value? Do they like using it

Integrate with an analytics product like Amplitude to see feedback from specific segments.
Hopefully, the feedback from them is getting better (for example, “I’m so glad y’all finally built
this feature — it was much-needed! Now I can ________”)

Creating a process to pause and look back on your product development efforts can help
combat a common sentiment from leadership to “just keep building” to showcase output/
regular releases to their stakeholders. Instead, you can show whether you’re working on the right
problems and solving them in a way that users appreciate. Also, think about how to create a
cadence to share these learnings with your stakeholders so they better understand why the
“factory is shut down” and that constant output isn’t the only path to product success.

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Dysfunction #6: The Business School

— overuse of science and data

Business school is where you go to analyze business but not actually do business.

Similarly, product teams can get so wrapped up in over-analyzing everything that they

avoid making tough but essential judgment calls.

Some product managers will meticulously calculate return on investment (ROI) analyses to
decide which features to pursue. With this approach, no product decisions are being made

at all. Typically, it’s simply the lowest-effort improvements that end up above the cutline.

To make strategic decisions, you must consider the customers and the larger business strategy,
not just mathematically calculated ROIs.

Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard

Product management is part art, part science. Knowing when to use data vs. your gut instinct
takes years to master (plus you need time for that gut instinct to mature). With Productboard’s
new commenting feature (in beta) you can add some commentary on why something is
prioritized so your roadmap audience can understand and ask follow-up questions,

keeping the conversation contextualized to the roadmap item.

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Dysfunction #7: The Roller Coaster

— fast-paced twists and turns

A roller coaster is all about fast thrills and wild, whiplashing movements. In product
management, investors and executives like to see immediate results, and when those

results don’t materialize right away, they can be tempted to pivot suddenly, creating

roller-coaster whiplash.

You need to be patient and provide sufficient opportunities for success. Otherwise, you’ll get
false negatives, where a feature that is truly a good idea fails because there wasn’t time to
properly execute it. Daisy-chained together, these false negatives result in a headache-inducing
roller coaster ride for product development that ends up in exactly the same place it started.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
Combating this dysfunction will require some process discipline to create patience. To do this,
you’ll need a buffer built into the roadmap so the team can find time to look back at previous
releases to analyze user behavior metrics and collect qualitative feedback.

Within Productboard, you can create that buffer and manually place it into a roadmap so that
stakeholders know there’s time reserved to work on something, although what may not be
known yet. This way, you slow the roller coaster and get stakeholders used to the idea of a post-
release “cool down” instead of an immediate pivot because the first version wasn’t perfect
(which it rarely is).

Now (Q2) Soon (Q3) Later (next year)

Iteration Drive new user adoption Improve new user adoption

Video calls Assess results of beta

Buffer for improvements

New onboarding experience

Asana integration

Microservice refractor AWS migration DB upgrade

Operation

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Dysfunction #8: The Bridge to Nowhere

— over-engineering for future unknowns

Imagine if a team of engineers designed and constructed a bridge over a river to connect a

city to a wilderness area where another city might someday exist. They invest a tremendous
amount of time, money, and resources, and then the second city never gets built. What a waste!

That’s what happens with many product teams. They get excited about developing the
infrastructure to get the product just right and then end up overengineering a product,

trying to account for future needs that aren’t relevant — and may never be.

Focus on current needs. In the future, you can always adjust.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
Once again, using color coding or swim lanes to show what roadmap items are related to the
infrastructure, architecture, or technical debt can help stakeholders understand what the major
investments are so you can get alignment on whether the size of the bet matches the expected
customer and business value.

Now (Q2) Soon (Q3) Later (next year)

Iteration New employee onboarding Improve onboarding

Select work devices Create a Contributor+ user role Embedded payroll

Mental health options Swag box

Allow SSO Select work apps DB upgrade

Operation

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Dysfunction #9: The Negotiating Table

— trying to keep everyone happy

Sometimes, product meetings can turn into a negotiating table as the product manager tries to
give everyone what they want.

Product managers often believe that success means keeping all of their stakeholders happy —
or, at least, minimizing their unhappiness — but when teams and individuals throughout the
organization collectively want more than engineering can potentially deliver, this becomes
practically impossible.

It’s not your job to give everyone what they want. Your job is to give customers what they want.
When you prioritize the right things for the customer, you help every team, whether those teams
realize it or not.

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Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard
One simple way to ensure everyone understands why you might need to say no to some ideas/
requests vs. others is to have a transparent prioritization framework. Productboard’s drivers and
prioritization scores can help you show the value vs. effort tradeoff that led to your decision on
whether to include something in the roadmap or not. This way, viewers of the roadmap can drill
into the scoring to understand where their items stand.

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Dysfunction #10: The Throne Room

— whipsaw decision-making

from the person in charge

Sometimes, the founder or CEO just can’t let go, and they morph from CEO to king or queen

in a throne room. They make and override decisions on anything and everything, sometimes
without even offering a rationale.

In these situations, the CEO typically fails to drive alignment around the product direction,

so no one really understands what they’re doing or why.

It’s an impossible situation for a product team that prevents the scaling of the company beyond
a single decision-maker. For the most effective product management, the product team needs
the ability to call their own shots.

Addressing this dysfunction with Productboard

I recently talked to the creator of the SU-RICE prioritization framework. Through Productboard,
you can customize your scorecard to include a field for the source of the idea and user persona
who’d benefit, placing a higher emphasis on customers, sales, or specific execs (or not!).

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About Prodify

If you like what you’ve read, we encourage you to connect with us to learn more about who 

we serve and how we can help. We offer variations of the following core services to founders,
CEOs, product executives, product team leads, individual PMs, and investors. Many clients 

use multiple services and have opted to continue working with us for years as their product
needs evolve.

• Executive / Team Coaching: Helping product leaders and their teams deliver more customer
and business value, sharpen their product skills, feel more confident in their decisions, and
ultimately reach their career goals

• Strategic Advising: Guiding teams to align on their key customer and business outcomes,
defining a customer journey vision, and crafting a product strategy to realize that vision

• Hiring: Confirming product team needs, crafting a compelling job description, screening
candidates (including through a tailored case study or activity), convincing candidates to join 

the team, and getting them ramped up to start contributing quickly

• Consulting: serving as a fractional product management executive/leader or as an individual

product manager, conducting and summarizing user research, and establishing a product-
driven culture and operations

• Training/Speaking: explaining the value of being product-driven and how to use Vision-Led
Product Management to help the company achieve its mission

We talk to lots of companies about their product challenges, and we’re always glad to meet
more to provide some high-level guidance based on their specific situation. So please visit
prodify.group or email Rajesh directly at [email protected] — we’re here to help.

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About Productboard

Productboard is a customer-centric product management platform that helps organizations 


get the right products to market, faster. Over 5,400 companies, including Microsoft, Zoom,
1-800-Contacts, and UiPath, use Productboard to understand what users need, prioritize 

what to build next, and rally everyone around their roadmap. With offices in San Francisco,
Prague, and Vancouver, Productboard is backed by leading investors like Dragoneer 

Investment Group, Tiger Global Management, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia 

Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Credo Ventures.



Learn more at productboard.com

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