Ownership in product

A Product Manager is supposed to be the great connector—the person who brings engineering, design, and business together. PMs are expected to be curious, collaborative, and customer-obsessed. They align stakeholders, navigate ambiguity, and create clarity from chaos. They're not the boss, but they lead. Not the expert, but the glue.

That's the textbook version. In reality, PMs don't want to collaborate. They want to own, and reap the successes. They want the shortest route from idea to delivery. They optimise for control, not truth. They carve up domains like colonial administrators and jealously guard their turf.

PMs work in their own lane. I have yet to see truly excellent product team collaboration.

Product Managers naturally optimise for different things—delivery velocity, strategic alignment, customer experience, stakeholder pressure—depending on their responsibilities, skillsets, and context. That's not a problem. That's powerful, if you can harness it.

At most orgs, engineering bandwidth is the single biggest constraint. That alone should force us to slow down, scrutinise our bets, and spend more time in the messy space of disagreement and idea exploration. Instead, we move faster, build worse, and avoid hard conversations.

The solution isn't assigning ownership of "domains" to individual PMs, who then become miniature CEOs. They should, at most, have stewardship over specific projects, but the Product Team, as a whole, owns the problem and the outcome.

Until we start acting like it, we'll keep shipping half-baked features no one asked for—and calling it success.