Bad Product Model: No Plan, No Rhythm, No Excuses
There’s a particular kind of chaos that emerges in product organizations, and it’s not the good kind.
It’s the chaos where teams ship features nobody asked for. Where engineers rebuild systems that were fine. Where roadmaps change every month based on whoever shouted loudest. Where product managers spend more time in meetings about meetings than talking to users.
I’ve seen this chaos up close, both as a PM drowning in it and as a product leader trying to eliminate it. And what I’ve learned: this chaos doesn’t come from moving fast or being agile or responding to market changes.
In fact; it comes from product leaders who don’t provide three fundamental things: a plan, a rhythm, and accountability.
Remember to avoid: No plan. No rhythm. No excuses.
Plan: You’re Not Making
I don’t mean your three-year strategic roadmap that lives in a deck nobody reads. I mean the plan that answers these questions for every PM on your team:
What problem are we solving and for whom?
What does success look like in numbers we can measure?
What are we explicitly NOT doing so we can focus?
How does this connect to business objectives that leadership actually cares about?
Most product leaders skip this. They give their teams themes instead of clarity. “We’re focused on growth this quarter.” Okay, what does that mean? Growth in which metric? For which user segment? By how much? At what cost?
Without specific answers, every PM interprets differently. One optimizes for new user acquisition. Another focuses on reactivation or retention. A third works on expansion revenue. All three succeed by their own definitions and the company goes nowhere.
That’s not empowerment. That’s abdication.
I’ve seen some of the product orgs had seven different definitions of “active user” across teams. Seven. And they’re literally measuring success differently depending on who you asked. Revenue conversations were nightmares because nobody agreed on what was working.
The plan you’re not making creates the chaos you’re then spending all your time managing.
Rhythm: You’re Not Enforcing
Product work without rhythm becomes reactive thrashing. You know the pattern:
Monday: Leadership wants an update on the initiative you mentioned two weeks ago.
Tuesday: A customer escalation pulls your team into emergency mode.
Wednesday: Sales/Commercial needs a demo of features that don’t exist yet.
Thursday: Your skip-level wants to “align” on strategy, which means redoing your roadmap.
Friday: You’re wondering why nothing shipped this week.
This isn’t bad luck. This is what happens when product leaders don’t establish and enforce rhythm.
Rhythm means predictable cadences for the activities that matter, what if we think of that rhythm in a different way:
User research happens in weeks 1 and 5 of every quarter. Not when someone remembers to schedule it. Not when a PM gets curious. Systematically, with protected time and required participation.
Roadmap review happens on the second Tuesday of each month. With the same stakeholders, the same format, the same decision-making framework (using existing materials and no extra preparations). So everyone knows when their input window is instead of ambushing PMs randomly.
Sprint planning happens Thursday afternoons. Retros happen Friday mornings. Product critiques happen Wednesday at 2pm. These aren’t suggestions—they’re infrastructure.
Strategy review happens once per quarter, not once per week. You set direction, then you execute against it. You don’t re-litigate the plan every time someone has a new idea.
Without rhythm, your PMs spend half their energy just figuring out when things are supposed to happen and who needs to be involved. They’re building calendars instead of building products.
Best product organizations I’ve seen are almost boring in their predictability. Everyone knows when user research cycles run. Everyone knows when roadmap decisions get made. Everyone knows when they’ll get feedback on their work.
This isn’t rigidity. This is respect for your team’s cognitive load.
Excuses: You’re Accepting
A PM misses their quarterly objectives. What happens?
In most organizations: nothing. Or worse; the PM presents a compelling narrative about market conditions, technical complexity, and cross-functional dependencies. Everyone nods sympathetically. The same PM misses next quarter too.
This is where product leaders fail most dramatically: accepting excuses instead of requiring accountability.
I’m not talking about being a sociopath who ignores legitimate obstacles. I’m talking about distinguishing between explanations and excuses:
Explanation: “We missed our engagement target because the technical approach we chose hit scaling issues three weeks before launch. We’re pivoting to a simpler implementation that we’ll ship next month, and what we learned about our technical decision-making process.”
Excuse: “We missed our engagement target because engineering was pulled onto other priorities and design took longer than expected and we didn’t get the marketing support we needed.”
One owns the outcome and articulates learning. The other diffuses responsibility across the organization until nobody’s accountable for anything.
As a product leader, your job is to call this out. Not with cruelty, but with clarity:
“I hear that engineering prioritization was a challenge. But you knew that in week three of the quarter. What did you do when you realized the plan was at risk? Did you escalate? Did you adjust scope? Did you renegotiate timelines? Or did you hope it would work out?”
This is uncomfortable. Most product leaders avoid it. They let their teams miss objectives repeatedly while accepting narratives about how hard product work is.
Yes, product work is hard. That’s why we need accountability, not sympathy.
What Happens Without These Three Things
I’ve watched product organizations operate without plan, rhythm, or accountability. How it looks like:
PMs become order-takers. Without a clear plan from leadership, they default to building whatever stakeholders request. The loudest voice wins, not the most important problem.
Teams burn out from chaos. Without rhythm, every week feels like improvisation. Nobody knows what’s important. Everything feels urgent. People work weekends trying to catch up on a treadmill that never stops.
Mediocrity becomes acceptable. Without accountability, shipping becomes the only metric that matters. It doesn’t matter if anyone uses the feature. It doesn’t matter if it moves metrics. You shipped, so you succeeded.
The organization stays busy but goes nowhere. You have activity without progress. Motion without movement.
The cruel part: your PMs will blame themselves. They’ll think they’re bad at prioritization, bad at stakeholder management, bad at execution. They’ll burn out thinking it’s a personal failure when it’s actually a leadership gap.
Product Leader’s Actual Job
Early in my career, I thought product leadership was about having the best product instincts. About being the person with the most visionary ideas.
That’s not it.
Product leadership is about creating the conditions where your PMs can do their best work. That means:
Providing clarity about what matters. This is the plan. Not themes, not platitudes of specific problems, specific outcomes, specific success metrics. If your PMs can’t explain what they’re trying to achieve and why it matters, you haven’t given them a plan.
Protecting focus through structure. This is the rhythm. Predictable processes that batch interrupt-driven work into specific windows so your team has uninterrupted time to think, research, and build.
Requiring ownership of outcomes. This is accountability. When PMs succeed, celebrate specifically what they did well. When they miss, require specific learning about what they’d do differently. No vague explanations, no diffused responsibility.
These aren’t the sexy parts of product leadership. They’re not the inspiring vision presentations or the clever product strategy. They’re the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
What This Looks Like in Practice
If you want to to restructure product operations at your company, you can follow a simple approach:
Every PM has a one-page plan that fits on a single slide. Problem statement, target metric, success criteria, what we’re not doing. If you can’t fit it on one page, you don’t understand it well enough. We have spoken about it by building an operating model named “Autobahn“ in case you want to read about it.
Every ritual has a standing time. User research cycles, roadmap reviews, stakeholder syncs, team retros; all scheduled for the full year. No hunting for calendar time, no schedule negotiation. The infrastructure is just there.
Every quarter ends with PM presentations where they present: what they committed to, what they achieved, what blocked them, and what they learned. No slides about market conditions or technical complexity unless they’re explaining specifically what actions they took when they encountered those obstacles.
Objections I Hear
“This sounds too rigid. We need to be agile.”
Agility isn’t the absence of structure. It’s the ability to change direction quickly when you learn something new. But you can only change direction if you had one to begin with. Random pivoting isn’t agility; it’s just randomness.
“Every team is different. We can’t have one rhythm for everyone.”
You’re right that teams face different challenges. You’re wrong that this means every team needs a different operating cadence. The rhythm is about when decisions happen and how information flows. Those should be consistent so people can collaborate.
“We don’t want to create a culture of blame with too much accountability.”
Accountability isn’t blame. Blame is retroactive finger-pointing. Accountability is proactive ownership. You’re not punishing people for missing targets. You’re requiring them to learn from misses and adjust. That’s how people grow.
To Every Product Leader Reading This
If your product org feels chaotic, if your PMs seem overwhelmed, if you’re constantly firefighting instead of building; ask yourself honestly:
Do your PMs have a clear, specific plan they can articulate in two sentences?
Do they know exactly what success looks like in measurable terms? Or are they interpreting vague strategic themes and hoping they guessed right?
Does your organization have predictable rhythms for the activities that matter? Or is everything negotiated ad-hoc depending on who’s available and what’s currently on fire?
When your PMs miss objectives, do you require them to own the outcome and extract learning? Or do you accept elaborate explanations about external factors while the same patterns repeat?
If you’re not providing these clarities; you’re not doing your job. And I don’t say that to be harsh but I say it because I’ve failed at this myself and watched the consequences at a point of time.
Your team doesn’t need you to have the best product ideas. They need you to create clarity, structure, and accountability. That’s the leadership that matters.
A Standard You Set
What you can tell every PM who joins your team: “I will give you a clear plan, protect your ability to execute through consistent rhythm, and hold you accountable for outcomes. In return, I expect you to own your commitments fully; no excuses, only learning.”
Some people love this. Others find it too demanding.
That’s fine. Product management isn’t for everyone.
But for PMs who want to build things that matter, who want to grow through real feedback, who want clarity over comfort; this is how you create the environment where they thrive.
Build the infrastructure. Set the standard. Watch your team become what they’re capable of being.
Glad you said this, Wafaey. Having the infrastructure and accountability makes PM easier.
I love the idea of having a “mission” one pager for each team!