Daksha Patel

Hot take: A massive backlog isn’t customer-centric. It’s indecision made visible. If you’re listening to the market, framing problems clearly, tying work to a 24–36 month ROI, and shipping an MVP with iterative releases, why is there still a backlog? Who is letting monetizable work get deprioritized? Isn’t the ideal state no backlog? What a big backlog actually signals: 🧭 Strategy fog - no sharp outcomes, so everything “might” matter. 💸 Monetization later - willingness-to-pay isn’t a gate, it’s a hope. 🧲 Pet projects - loudest voice wins, not the ROI. 🏭 Feature factory - output over outcomes. 🏦 Project funding - one-offs instead of durable product bets. 🧽 Never-delete culture - ideas pile up because no one says “no.” ⏳ No cost-of-delay math - urgency is a vibe, not a number. The ideal state: no traditional backlog. Replace it with a 90-day option pool. If an item can’t credibly start within 90 days, it goes to an Idea Bank you are proud to prune. How to run it: 🎯 Set three outcome themes for the quarter, with explicit “won’t do” statements. 💵 Tag every item as Monetize, Retain, or Protect and make Monetize the tie-breaker. 📈 Quantify cost of delay weekly and sort by ROI within 24–36 months. 🧪 Ship MVP → iterative releases with clear exit/scale criteria at each gate. 🧹 Enforce WIP limits and purge anything older than 90 days. 🛑 Keep a public kill list with the reason each idea lost. 🧯 Reserve capacity guardrails (e.g., 50% growth, 25% reliability/debt, 15% compliance, 10% discovery). 🗣 Validate with real buyers before entering “Now/Next.” 🔁 Re-prioritize on a fixed weekly cadence, not in ad-hoc fire drills. Backlog bloat is product debt. Clean it weekly. Your customers will feel it in cycle time, outcomes, and revenue. PMs are accountable for all their product outcomes - financial impact, adoption, savings, a clear value prop, increased bookings, and more. Disagree? Convince me why your backlog helps customers.

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if someone told me I’d confidently say things like scrum, agile and sprint retrospective and actually know what they mean, I probably would’ve smiled, nodded… and quietly exited the conversation. When I first considered transitioning into product management, the terminology alone almost sent me back to my comfort zone. Scrum? Agile? Backlog grooming? It all sounded like something only developers in hoodies were allowed to understand. And honestly? It scared me. But here’s what I discovered after transitioning: There was nothing to be scared of. Scrum isn’t a monster. Agile isn’t a personality trait. A sprint doesn’t require actual running. They’re just structured ways of working. The “technical” wall I built in my head? It was mostly just… vocabulary. Once I understood that product management is really about: • Solving real problems • Communicating clearly • Aligning people • Making decisions with incomplete information • And caring deeply about users Everything clicked. The frameworks didn’t change who I was. They simply gave structure to what I was already capable of doing. Transitioning into product management taught me something bigger than backlog management: Sometimes the thing that scares you isn’t complexity, it’s unfamiliar language. And once you learn the language, you realise you belonged in the room all along. If you’re thinking about transitioning but the terminology is intimidating you… this is your sign. Don’t let vocabulary stop your growth. Half the time, we’re not scared of the role. We’re just scared of the words. And trust me you’ll be saying “let’s circle back in the next sprint” with confidence sooner than you think.

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The Leadership Theory vs. The Job Market Reality 🎯 Happy Friday! Had a networking call today where someone mentioned a VP IT role they're considering. The catch? It's also a hands-on developer job. That hit close to home. I'm looking at Director of Product Management positions, and I keep coming across the same thing: jobs asking for strategic leadership, people management, and the ability to work as an individual contributor, all at the same level of delivery. Anyone else noticing this? It got me thinking. All the leadership advice out there tells you that as you move up, you shift from doing to directing. Less execution, more coaching and strategy. Your job is to set the vision and enable your team to execute it. Except... that's not what I'm seeing in actual job postings. So I did some digging into what's really happening: 📊 41% of companies eliminated management layers last year (Korn Ferry). 📊 Gartner says 20% of orgs will flatten their structure by 2026 using AI. 📊 Managers are handling 20-40% more direct reports than pre-pandemic. 📊 Manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27% — the most significant decline of any group (Gallup). The result? Companies want "player-coaches" now. Directors and VPs who can: 1️⃣ Lead teams and contribute to deliverables. 2️⃣ Think strategically and stay technical/hands-on. 3️⃣ Coach people and show them how it's done. 4️⃣ Get more done with smaller teams. According to McKinsey, Deloitte, and Korn Ferry, this isn't just a blip. It's structural — driven by AI, budget constraints, and flatter organizations. Here's the thing: In 10+ years working in healthcare technology, I've done both. Strategy and execution. The big picture and the details. It might be where leadership is heading across the board. The people who'll do well aren't going to be pure strategists or pure doers. They'll be comfortable doing both — working through ambiguity, influencing without formal authority, jumping in to solve problems directly when needed, or coaching others through them. What are you seeing? If you're in a leadership role, are you feeling this pull in both directions? How are you making it work? Would love to hear what others are experiencing. A ChatGPT-generated image is used for a visual reference. #ProductManagement #Leadership #Director #VP #Humanity

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Reminder to all and note for those new to agile and scrum: A Product Owner is not a spec writer. Acceptance criteria define testable behavior -> not tasks. If your team says: “we need everything defined before we start” “refinement isn’t where decisions happen” “unclear = PO fault” Then you DO NOT have Scrum. You have spec-driven delivery hiding behind Agile. In other words, performance theater. #agile #productmanagement #SAFe

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Ticketmaster just wiped out its 60+ person PMO. Another "brand" company too. Is this the end of the traditional PMO? I got the intel straight from my former colleagues who were there when it happened. This isn't just a "downsizing." It’s a structural shift. The PMO was traditionally the ‘connective tissue’—the force that bridged cross-functional programs between Product, Design, Engineering, and the rest of the organization. PMO leaders owned Strategic Planning, MVP Roadmapping, Annual/Quarterly OKRs/KPIs, Status Dashboards, and Agile Ceremonies. AI is making all of that obsolete. Status Dashboards, Reports, and Dependency Maps are now available in real-time. Strategic Planning and MVP Roadmapping are being replaced by "Adaptive Strategy." But there is one gap AI can’t fill: Someone still needs to be the adult in the room. Someone needs to be the objective mediator between the CEO’s vision, the "new shiny object" chase, and the competing priorities of other leaders. Someone has to ENFORCE alignment, hold leaders ACCOUNTABLE, and STOP the "Human Tax" caused by Strategic Whiplash, Context Switching, Sunk Cost, and Momentum Loss. This is exactly what I had to do at the gaming startup Consortium9. As the CPO / Strategic Operations Systems Architect, I stepped into $6M burned in 2 years with zero product. After forced layoffs and a mandatory 64% burn reduction, I had to be that "adult." I built a NEW ‘Vision to Action’ engine and launched the MVP in just 8 weeks—hitting 3.5x KPIs in the first month. I had never launched a game or platform before. I succeeded because I prioritized the engine over tradition. The Reality Check: There won’t be enough ‘Strategic Operations’ openings for every PMO professional losing their job to AI. The top 1% will adapt. They will stop being "coordinators" and start being "architects." The other 99%? Will an ‘AI Project Management Certification’ really save you from the inevitable? The Ticketmaster news is your wake-up call. The real question is: Why is your leadership team staying silent about this? Most execs are watching these roles vanish without offering a single word of guidance on how to pivot. If your leadership isn't preparing you for this shift, what are you doing right now to build your own exit ramp? I’m curious—how is your organization actually handling the conversation around these "vanishing" roles (or are they just ignoring it)?

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Product Ops POV A Product Ops lesson I was reminded of while facilitating a cross‑functional working session this week: Teams don’t struggle to come up with solutions. They struggle to clearly name the problem. We started the day with a structured exercise designed to surface the things people see, feel, or quietly work around—but don’t always say out loud. The rule was simple: name the issue, not the fix. And almost immediately, human nature showed up. Instead of stating the problem, people jumped straight to: “We should…” As the facilitator, I kept stopping the group and pushing them back: 👉 What’s the actual problem? 👉 Say it without proposing a solution. That constraint was uncomfortable. It slowed things down. And it made the work better. By forcing ourselves to capture clean problem statements, we had something solid to work with later. When we shifted to the afternoon, we didn’t invent objectives from scratch—we clustered the morning’s problems into themes. Those themes became our objectives. And many of the key results came directly from the original problem statements, just reframed as outcomes. Being able to connect those dots in real time as a team was genuinely energizing. What started as scattered frustration turned into clarity—clarity on purpose, confidence in the operating model, and belief in the system we built together. This is the part of Product Ops work I care most about: creating enough structure to slow teams down at the right moment, so they can move forward with intent instead of noise. Takeaway: If you want better solutions, don’t rush alignment. Get precise about the problem first. #productops #leadership #facilitation #operatingmodels #teamwork #systems

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Product Management vs Project Management... It's not a battle, these are actually complementary disciplines. Today’s episode of the Product Thinking with Melissa Perri podcast might be my most clarifying 7 minutes on this topic. If you've ever had that coworker who constantly confuses the two (or if you're still figuring it out yourself), this episode breaks it down in an easy-to-digest way. Here's the thing: organizations treat these roles like they're competing when they should be collaborating. When Agile emerged, it shifted a lot of project management responsibilities onto product managers. That's fine, but it created a dangerous misconception that project management is all we do. Project management is just one small piece of our role. The best outcomes happen when both functions work together. Product managers define roadmaps and priorities. Project managers coordinate complex initiatives that cut across multiple teams and products. In smaller companies, PMs often wear both hats. In larger, more complex organizations, dedicated program managers become essential. Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform to get the complete breakdown! How clear is this distinction in your organization?

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Stop asking your Product Managers to be Project Managers. We’ve all seen it: A product team scales, and suddenly, the PMs are drowning. They aren't talking to users or refining the vision; they’re spending 60% of their week chasing data, auditing tool access, and syncing spreadsheets. This is the "Scaling Tax"—and it’s exactly why Product Ops matters. Product Ops isn't just about "fixing the process." It’s about protecting the time of your builders. It’s the connective tissue that ensures: • Insight at Scale: Centralizing customer feedback so it doesn’t live (and die) in a single Slack channel. • Consistency: Creating a "Product Playbook" so every launch feels like a well-oiled machine, regardless of which squad is leading it. • Strategic Alignment: Bridging the gap between high-level company goals and the day-to-day roadmap. The bottom line: If you want a product-led culture, you need an operational foundation. Product Ops doesn't just make things "neat"—it makes innovation sustainable. Have you seen the "Scaling Tax" hit your team? How are you fighting back? #ProductOps #ProductManagement #OperationalExcellence #Scaling #Strategy

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Hot take: your team isn’t stuck because they lack talent or resources. They’re stuck because they lack clarity. I recently spoke with a CEO whose product team had done a ton of user research, identified clear opportunities, made sexy prototypes, and were still spinning their wheels. Why? Because every conversation about what to build next led to total gridlock. Pretty sure we’ve all been there. And when it happens, it’s perfectly natural to feel like something’s missing. And then to bubble that “something’s missing” feeling up to the leaders we think can fix it. And good leaders will jump at the opportunity to help unblock their team, so they’ll start saying things like “resource realignment” and “talent debt.” But most stuck teams aren’t missing crucial resources. They’re missing crucial clarity about what’s truly keeping them stuck. So before you start reorganizing or hiring your way out of it, get honest about the real diagnosis. Because the antidote depends entirely on what’s actually broken. 💡 Are you lacking clarity about what matters most? Everything feels urgent, nothing feels optional, and your roadmap looks like a wish list written by a committee. Try Shreyas Doshi’s LNO framework: Leverage initiatives move the business forward, Neutral ones keep the lights on, Overhead ones slow you down. Make those endless prioritization debates a lot more productive. 💡 Are you lacking clarity about purpose vs. output? Your team ships consistently but nothing feels like it's moving the needle. Marty Cagan talks about the difference between product discovery (figuring out what to build) and product delivery (building it well). If your team feels busy but not effective, you might be shortcutting discovery. 💡 Are you lacking clarity about what’s good enough? Nothing ever feels ready to ship. Your team keeps polishing, adding "just one more thing," pushing dates because it's not quite perfect yet. Reid Hoffman nailed this: if you're not embarrassed by your first version, you launched too late. Sometimes impossibly high standards are what's keeping you stuck. 💡 Are you lacking clarity about your users? Your team spends more time in Slack debating what users want than talking to actual users. Steve Blank’s "get out of the building" and Pragmatic Institute’s NIHITO (nothing important happens in the office) principle sound obvious until you realize how many brilliant teams are making educated guesses instead of thoughtful observations. Here’s the awesome news: most of these problems fix themselves pretty quickly once you name them and commit to doing something differently. The hard part is getting honest about what’s actually broken. So next time you think "What's missing?" try asking "What clarity are we lacking?" instead. And yes, that’s me, getting myself unstuck a whopping six inches off the ground. Practice what you preach, amirite? 😅

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One of the questions I get asked most often is, "How do I break into product if every PM role asks for experience?" It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Most PM roles require experience, but how do you get experience if you’ve never had the job? My advice: don’t wait for the opportunity. Create it. It’s often easier than it sounds. Here are a few ways to build real product experience before you have the title: 1. Do a small consulting-style product project: Help a friend in product or partner with a founder at an early-stage startup who needs product help. Learn the business goals and KPIs. Dig into the core product. What’s working? What isn’t? Talk to users. Run a usability study. Do a competitive analysis. Synthesize what you learn. 2. Look for product problems around you: If you’re a student, your university is full of opportunities hiding in plain sight: a campus website or app, ticketing for athletic events, the admissions experience, or a local campus business trying to improve discovery or conversion. If you’re out of school, look around your neighborhood: a restaurant with a broken website, a small business struggling with online ordering, or a mom-and-pop shop that can’t be found on Google. 3. Use AI to help businesses work better: A huge number of small and mid-size businesses are exposed right now and don’t know where to start. You can help them get organized, whether it be cleaning up their site so AI tools can interpret it or setting them up with basic AI tools for internal workflows. 4. Analyze products you use every day: Apps you love. Apps you hate. Shopping, streaming, social, fitness. Why do they work? Where do they fall down? What would you prioritize if you owned the roadmap? Write it up with screenshots, tradeoffs, and reasoning. If you’re solving real problems for real people, you’re doing product work. And that absolutely counts as experience. Product experience isn’t just about the title you’ve had. It’s about the problems you’ve tackled, the decisions you’ve made, and how you think. And if you’re doing that, it belongs on your resume and LinkedIn. #ProductManagement  #Careers  #CareerSwitching  #TechCareers  #MBA

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I finally did it. 😭 I broke up with ChatGPT. i left it for Gemini. 💔 It felt like I was throwing away three years of trial and error. The highs, the lows. The good times, the bad. All the shared memories and experiences. We treat LLMs as chat tools, but they are "Context Containers." They hold your mental models, your constraints, and your shorthand. Walking away is expensive! I recently realized I needed Google’s ecosystem because it enables more of the projects I want to build, but I refused to start from zero. So, I treated this like an Enterprise Platform Migration. The Goal: An ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) of my own identity. 🛑 Native ChatGPT "Data Export" failed. 1.09 GB of raw logs. Useless noise, hallucinations, and tons of drama. What I needed was a user manual. So I built the "Digital Twin Migration" Protocol: 1️⃣ Extract I ran two prompts to export the data: The Architect: Hard settings and rules. The Exit Interview: Behavioral nuances ("the vibe"). 2️⃣ Transform I used a "Compiler Prompt" to synthesize the hard rules and soft skills into a cohesive "Persona Activation Statement." 3️⃣ Load I mapped the new identity to Gemini’s memory. Global rules in "Saved Info," deep strategy in a "Custom Gem." 🧪 The Test I ran a vague prompt about AI governance. ✅ The Result It skipped the platitudes, avoided em-dashes, and excluded all binary framing ("not x, but y"). ✨ It worked! Gemini knows who I am and what I like. ✨ 🧠 The Lesson Real leverage is platform agility. By treating your context history as a transferable dataset, you regain control. 💡Want the scripts? ⬇️ I documented the exact prompts (Architect, Exit Interview, Compiler, Unit Test) in an SOP. ➡️ https://lnkd.in/e2KHpNcU 💔 Want the full breakup saga?🍫 I wrote the complete story of heartbreak and redemption on my blog. Grab some chocolate and read the deep dive here: https://lnkd.in/eiEPqzeA

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