4 minute read
Is there a downside to having overly versatile product managers? Are your product managers doing too much of the wrong work? Discover how product manager role confusion and reactive habits are quietly undermining your product strategy.
You didn’t set out to inherit a philosophical problem. But somewhere between headcount plans and product launch calendars, you did.
Your team is composed of smart, capable individuals – some from engineering, some from marketing, others from sales or services. They’re loyal. They’re talented. They want to help. And yet, as you watch them in meetings, read their briefs, observe their decisions, a strange unease forms: despite using the same words, they don’t seem to mean the same things.
They each bring their own histories, their own instincts, their own invisible definitions. What begins as energy soon starts to resemble entropy. And you find yourself not leading a product function but moderating an ongoing, low-grade identity crisis.
When “Stepping Up” Becomes Stepping Off Course
You’ve seen it happen. Something urgent comes up -say, a product description is needed for an upcoming campaign. The marketing team fumbles. No one owns the output. There are too many dependencies. You feel the clock ticking.
Then, one of your product managers intervenes: “I’ll do it.” It’s not their job, but they’re smart and they care. They write the copy. It’s good. Everyone thanks them. You do too.
But later, quietly, you wonder: what was the cost?
You lost your product manager for two weeks to something peripheral. They burned hours on a deliverable someone else should have owned. And worst of all, they were rewarded for it. They became the hero. You know what that means: next time, they’ll do it again.
It’s not that you dislike initiative. You admire it. But the product manager as firefighter is a seductive trap. Each blaze extinguished comes at the expense of the real work: strategic thought, long-term planning, insight into customers you haven’t won yet. The work that doesn’t earn a Slack emoji, but would change the future if given time.
Why Your Product Team Feels Disjointed
The truth is, this isn’t about one fire or one product description. It’s about something more subtle: your team lacks a shared understanding, distinct purpose, a common language. They speak different dialects of the same language. A marketer-turned-product manager emphasizes messaging. A developer-turned-product manager obsesses over feasibility. They each believe they are doing the job. And in a way, they are. But they are not doing the same job.
You’ve probably seen this in meetings. Someone says “business case,” and heads nod, but when the document appears, it’s either a financial forecast, a competitive teardown, or a customer journey map. No one is lying. Everyone is misaligned.
This isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s the absence of a common map, a common understanding of who they are – and what they are responsible for.
The Trouble with Product Manager Versatility
You may have praised your product team for being adaptable. “Swiss Army knives,” you called them once, admiringly. But think about the metaphor. A Swiss Army knife is a survival tool. It’s what you carry when you’re lost in the woods.
And deep down, that’s what you’ve built: a team of survivors. They’re competent at anything, but masters of nothing. They fill every gap. They answer every call. And as a result, they have no time left for the work that defines their role.
Worse, you’ve seen how this pattern reinforces itself. When heroics become habit, workers begin to create their own emergencies just to feel needed. Gaps in responsibility remain open, not because they’re unavoidable, but because someone will always step in. You begin to suspect that the fires aren’t accidental anymore. They’re part of the culture now.
The Case for Product Manager Role Clarity
So how do you change it? What should a product manager’s job description truly entail?
You start not by pushing harder but by pausing. You begin with a question: what do you actually want your product managers to do?
Then you create space around that question. You invest not just in skillsets but in training and frameworks. But training that not built based on what could be perfect but built on what has to be Pragmatic. You bring your team into alignment—not around values in an abstract sense, but around expectations. Around language. Around purpose.
When one of your team members says “win-loss analysis,” everyone should know what that entails, how to do it, and who owns it. When they see a gap, they should pause, not pounce—because they trust the roles around them, and they trust yours to define the edges.
This takes effort. And patience. But it’s the kind of work that multiplies over time.
What You Stand to Gain
When your team shares definitions, you stop managing chaos and start shaping direction. You see fewer miscommunications. More energy goes to strategic decisions and less to reactive sprints. Your product managers shift from generalists to precision instruments—each one clear in their role, and powerful in its execution.
And you? You move from applauding heroics to enabling thought. From mending cracks to laying foundations. There’s a quiet kind of power in this, expect accolades from your boss and envy from your peers.
You no longer need to celebrate the person who steps in at the last minute. You’ve invested in a team where the last minute never arrives.
