No Backlog, No Problem
What Do the Fastest-Growing Product Leaders Have in Common?
One of the most common mistakes in product roles is confusing management with leadership. Many PMs focus on organizing tasks, facilitating meetings, or answering emails. While those things are sometimes necessary, they’re not the essence of the role. Because you know what? The true goal of a product leader is to have no backlog.
What!? Yes. Their purpose is to build a product so valuable that the team becomes almost dispensable. Or rather, that the product itself maximizes the return on effort from all teams involved.
If you're currently working on a product, imagine a solution that is so effective that it could achieve the same results with much less effort. If you can’t picture it yet, don’t worry. That’s where your job becomes more meaningful than ever: to find a solution that helps people deliver value where it’s most useful and essential. Problems, right? Why keep working on something that can be solved?
To get there, you need a mindset shift. Every decision a product team makes is an investment. And like any investment, it must deliver a return. That’s the mindset of the fastest-growing product leaders. And to embrace it, you need to learn how to decide: what to build, when, and why.
How can you do that?
First, prioritize problems, not solutions.
Then, estimate business impact (even if the certainty is low at first).
Next, validate hypotheses before building.
And finally, align everything with the business strategy.
In a constantly changing environment, leading is not about having all the answers—it's about knowing how to find them. Aim to be dispensable, and you’ll find many of them.