What's Most Important for Product Managers?

In the world of product management, there’s no shortage of advice, frameworks, methodologies, and tools claiming to hold the key to success. Attend a product management conference, and you’ll hear about roadmaps, KPIs, Agile rituals, stakeholder management, and user journey mapping. Browse online, and you’ll find an endless array of blogs, courses, and templates—all promising to make you a better product manager.

But here’s the thing: none of that matters if you can’t deliver output. Output is the single, non-negotiable metric of success for product managers. Customers don't care how beautifully crafted your roadmap is or how many retrospectives you’ve run. It’s not about how well you’ve internalized the latest PM framework. It’s about delivering a product that customers will either engage with or pay money to engage with. That’s it. Everything else is secondary—mere scaffolding to support the creation of real value.

Yet, in today’s environment, the clarity of this purpose has been diluted. Product management has become a service industry unto itself selling “products” on how to be a good PM. It’s a world increasingly focused on the process rather than the result. As a product manager, you can spend your time attending workshops, mastering frameworks, and debating methodologies—or you can focus on what truly matters: serving your customers and delivering value. Let’s explore why this focus on output is critical and how you can cut through the noise to do what matters most.

The Core of Product Management: Serving the Customer

At its essence, product management is a deceptively simple job: you’re responsible for building something people want. This could mean solving a problem, entertaining them, saving them time, or helping them make money. Whatever the case, your ultimate goal is to serve your customers in a way that makes their lives better.

Serving the customer is not an abstract principle; it’s an actionable mandate. It means deeply understanding your audience—what they need, what they value, and what they’re willing to pay for. It means ensuring that the features you prioritize, the UX decisions you advocate for, and the technical resources you allocate all contribute directly to creating something people will use and love. If your product doesn’t deliver value to your customer, no amount of internal finesse or polished decks will save you.

And here’s the kicker: output is the only way to serve your customer. You can’t iterate on an idea that hasn’t been shipped. You can’t solve a customer problem with a feature that’s stuck in the backlog. The faster you can get tangible, usable solutions into your customers’ hands, the faster you can learn, adapt, and ultimately succeed.

The Pitfalls of Overcomplication

Unfortunately, the product management field has drifted into a love affair with abstraction. We’ve created a road paved with the good intentions of books, blogs, and boot camps all vying to teach product managers how to be better at their jobs. While some of these resources are valuable, too many of them focus on optimizing the wrong things. They teach you how to be a great internal product manager—someone who can run a perfect sprint, manage stakeholders flawlessly, and craft a roadmap that dazzles executives. But they miss the mark when it comes to the ultimate goal: delivering something customers care about.

This overemphasis on process leads to what can only be described as a kind of meta-product management. Instead of creating products for customers, product managers increasingly create products for themselves—frameworks, templates, and rituals that look good in a case study but fail to move the needle for real users. It’s a dangerous distraction, one that prioritizes optics over outcomes and effort over results.

The truth is, customers don’t care how well you run a sprint. They don’t care how many frameworks you’ve mastered or how many internal stakeholders you’ve aligned. They care about one thing: whether your product solves their problem or enhances their life. That’s it. Everything else is noise. How customer value is created may change over time, but the needs of customers probably wont. Jeff Bezos is famous for saying "customers are always going to want low prices and fast shipping." He got all the way down to what customers really want and worked "backwards" from there.

Putting Output First

If output is the one thing that matters, then every decision you make as a product manager should flow from that principle. This doesn’t mean abandoning best practices or ignoring internal processes—it means using them as tools in service of delivering value, not as ends in themselves.

Here are some ways to reframe your approach to product management with output as your guiding star:

Start with the Customer, Not the Framework.

It’s tempting to start every project with a roadmap or a backlog grooming session, but those tools should come later. Start by talking to your customers. Understand their pain points, their workflows, and their goals. Get clarity on what they need, then focus on delivering it as quickly as possible.

Prioritize Ruthlessly.

When everything is a priority, nothing is. Instead of trying to deliver a perfect product with every bell and whistle, focus on the smallest, most impactful thing you can ship. What’s the one feature or improvement that will make the biggest difference for your users? Build that. Ship it. Then iterate.

Measure Results, Not Activity.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of measuring how busy you are rather than how effective you’re being. Don’t confuse effort with impact. Your success as a product manager isn’t measured by how many hours you work or how many meetings you attend—it’s measured by the results you deliver for your customers. I would even advise: be lazy. Conway's law is at play here. If you're overly busy in your approach your product probably will be too. Build something that's easy, elegant and intuitive.

Embrace Imperfection.

Output doesn’t mean delivering perfection on the first try. In fact, the best products are often the result of continuous iteration. Get something into your customers’ hands quickly, then use their feedback to improve. The faster you ship, the faster you learn, and the better your product becomes.

Ignore the Noise.

Resist the urge to chase every shiny new trend in product management. It’s easy to get distracted by the latest methodology or buzzword, but remember: none of that matters if you’re not delivering value to your customers. Stay focused on what’s essential, and let everything else take a back seat.

A Return to Fundamentals

At the end of the day, product management isn’t about mastering a particular set of tools or processes. It’s about creating value. It’s about output. Everything else—whether it’s stakeholder alignment, Agile rituals, or beautifully crafted roadmaps—is secondary. These are means to an end, not the end itself.

The field of product management doesn’t need more frameworks, courses, or gurus selling their version of success. What it needs is a return to fundamentals: a focus on serving the customer, creating value, and delivering output. That’s the one thing that matters.