23 Dec 2025 3 min read antifragility

Excuse-Driven Product Management

There is a recurring pattern in modern product organisations that rarely gets called out because it is uncomfortable, political, and often shielded by good intentions. It is not bad product management. It is excuse-driven product management.

There is a recurring pattern in modern product organisations that rarely gets called out because it is uncomfortable, political, and often shielded by good intentions.

It is not bad product management. It is excuse-driven product management.

You recognise it immediately. Work arrives as urgency. Context arrives later, if at all. Evidence never arrives. Teams scramble, priorities blur, and accountability dissolves.

And yet, everyone nods.

The Anatomy of the Pattern

Excuse-driven product management does not look reckless. It looks busy. It looks engaged. It looks customer-centric on the surface. That is precisely why it survives.

The core trait is simple: pressure is applied without proof, and urgency replaces judgement. Instead of framing problems, these PMs push solutions. Instead of validating signals, they amplify noise. Instead of protecting focus, they inject volatility.

The Greatest Hits of Product Excuses

Let us stop pretending these are rare.

“The customer is asking for it.”
One customer. Often the loudest. No segmentation, no revenue weighting, no churn analysis. Just a request elevated into a mandate.

“This is a big opportunity.”
No sizing. No probability. No downside. Opportunity becomes a synonym for hope.

“Leadership wants this.”
Leadership asked a question. The PM turned it into a delivery commitment instead of a structured option.

“We need to move fast.”
Speed is invoked without success metrics, rollback paths, or clarity on what ‘fast’ actually means.

“Engineering can figure it out.”
No problem statement. No constraints. No trade-offs. Responsibility is quietly transferred downstream.

“We will fix it later.”
Later rarely comes. Technical, product, and organisational debt accumulates while the PM moves on.

“It is just a small change.”
The words every system fears. Touches architecture, UX, operations, support, and metrics, yet framed as trivial.

“We cannot miss this window.”
Often there is no window. Just anxiety masquerading as market timing.

The Real Reason Behind the Excuses

These excuses are not ignorance. They are avoidance.

Avoidance of making trade-offs explicit. Avoidance of saying no to stakeholders. Avoidance of doing discovery instead of delivery theatre. Avoidance of owning outcomes instead of activity.

And when avoidance is not enough, manipulation enters the room.

Pressure is personalised:

Your bonus depends on this.
Now is not the time to take holidays.
Just do it, we will explain later.
Do you really want to be the one blocking this?

This is not leadership. It is emotional leverage used to compensate for weak arguments.

Urgency becomes a tool to silence questions. Loyalty is invoked to bypass judgement. Fear replaces reasoning.

The Collateral Damage

Teams feel it first.

Roadmaps become unstable. Context-switching explodes. Work is started, stopped, restarted, and reframed weekly. Nothing ever fully lands.

Context switching is the perverse chisel that erodes trust.

It destroys flow, but more importantly, it destroys meaning. When priorities shift without explanation, people stop believing explanations altogether. They disengage not out of laziness, but out of self-preservation.

The best engineers and product thinkers detect this early. They assess quality via negativa: not by what is present, but by what is missing loike clarity, continuity, respect for focus.

High performers seek high standards. When they repeatedly encounter chaos disguised as urgency, they do not complain. They leave.

Worse, this behaviour often comes from PMs who are too busy pushing upward to support downward. Coaching junior PMs is not urgent enough. Strategy is postponed. Systems thinking never happens.

The organisation slowly learns that the loudest signal wins.

What Real Product Leadership Looks Like

Real product leadership is quieter and far more disciplined.

It brings data before urgency.
It frames problems before proposing solutions.
It kills ideas with the same confidence it promotes them.
It protects teams from noise instead of amplifying it.
It understands that saying no is not obstruction. It is focus.

Most importantly, it treats prioritisation as a responsibility, not a negotiation.

The Leadership Mirror (Why This Survives)

This pattern survives because leadership often rewards motion over judgement.

Roadmaps packed with initiatives look like ownership. Escalations look like alignment. Urgency sounds like commitment. The organisation confuses visible stress with value creation.

In many companies, incentives quietly reinforce the behaviour. Performance reviews reward delivery volume, not decision quality. Bonuses follow short-term milestones, not long-term outcomes. Leaders ask what shipped far more often than why this mattered.

In that system, manipulation becomes rational. Applying personal pressure is faster than building a case. Invoking loyalty is easier than presenting evidence. Creating fear is cheaper than doing discovery.

This is why the behaviour repeats.

Not because people are bad, but because the system selects for urgency, noise, and compliance.

Until leaders explicitly demand evidence, trade-offs, and calm judgement, and protect those who slow things down for the right reasons, excuse-driven product management will remain the dominant survival strategy.

Teams will keep burning energy.

And leadership will keep wondering why focus never sticks.