Nobody told me this when I started. And nobody’s going to tell you.
So I will.
The job of a product manager is not to have good ideas. It’s not to write clean PRDs. It’s not to be “the voice of the customer” or to “manage stakeholders” or whatever other soft-focus corporate language we dress this thing up in.
The job of a product manager is to be loud in rooms full of people who want you to shut up.
That’s it. That’s the whole game.
And if you’re shy, if you need to be liked, if you’d rather let your work “speak for itself,” you’re going to get steamrolled.
Your roadmap will become a dumping ground for other people’s priorities.
Your product will become a Frankenstein’s monster of features nobody asked for.
And you’ll sit there wondering why your “great ideas” never ship.
Your work does not speak for itself. It has no mouth. You are the mouth. And if you don’t open it, someone else will speak for you. Someone who isn’t you, doesn’t know your users, and definitely doesn’t care about your roadmap.
Product Voyagers is back. Sharp takes on Product, AI & Mind Skills & straight to inbox.
Huge Myth of the “Collaborative” PM
The lie we tell ourselves: “I don’t need to be aggressive. I can be a collaborative PM. I build consensus. I bring people along.”
I/We believed this. For years. And it cost all of us.
Here’s what “collaborative” actually means in most organizations: you spend three months fighting for alignment, getting everyone to nod along in meetings, feeling really good about your process. And then one executive walks into a room, overturns your entire roadmap in seven minutes, and walks out to catch a flight.
Collaboration doesn’t mean being agreeable. Collaboration means fighting for your perspective until the decision is made, then committing to execution. The “fighting” part is where most PMs go quiet. And that silence is career suicide.
Three Rooms Where Shy PMs Die
There are specific moments in product work where the difference between a mediocre PM and a great one comes down to one question: Did you open your mouth?
Room #1: Roadmap Review
This is the room where your product lives or dies. Executives, senior leadership, cross-functional stakeholders. Everyone has opinions. Everyone has their pet project. And your roadmap is sitting on the table like fresh meat.
And what happens to shy PMs: They present the roadmap. They get questioned. They get defensive. They start negotiating. They add “just one more thing” because a VP asked. Then another. Then another.
They leave with a roadmap that belongs to everyone and no one. A political compromise that guarantees mediocrity.
Your Job: Walk into that room knowing exactly what you’re willing to die on and what you’re willing to sacrifice. And when someone pushes on something core, you don’t be quiet. You say: “That’s not on the roadmap, and here’s why. If we add it, we cut this. Those are the trade-offs. What’s your call?”
You’re not asking permission, however you’re forcing a decision.
Really that’s a big difference.
Room #2: Engineering Sync
Most PMs treat engineering like a restaurant. You submit an order, you wait, you get a dish. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not.
This is a disaster - and bad product thinking!
Your relationship with engineering is the engine of your entire job. And if you’re shy about it, if you let engineers make product decisions because you “trust them” or because you “don’t want to be that PM,” you’ve abdicated the throne.
Your Job: Be in their business. Not micromanaging. Not speccing every button. But deeply, annoyingly, persistently in their business. Ask why decisions were made. Challenge assumptions. Push back on scope changes that weren’t discussed. Call out when something doesn’t match the spec.
This will feel uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
Engineers respect PMs who know what they want and fight for it. They lose respect for PMs who say “whatever you think is best” because they’re too scared to have an opinion.
Room #3: Exec Standup
This is the room where careers are made. Five minutes. One slide. The CEO/CPO/SVP wants to know what’s happening.
Shy PMs bury themselves in data. They hedge. They say things like “we’re still gathering learnings” and “we’re seeing mixed signals” because they don’t want to be wrong.
You know what “mixed signals” sounds like to a CEO? “I don’t know what’s happening and I’m scared to commit.”
Your Job: Walk in with a point of view. Not a guess please. A point of view. “We’re seeing X, I believe it means Y, and here’s what we’re doing about it.” If you’re wrong, you’ll learn. If you’re right, you’ve just become the person who sees around corners.
PMs who get promoted are not the ones who avoid being wrong. They’re the ones who are willing to be wrong loudly, learn quickly, and course-correct visibly.
Productive Rudeness: Top Skill
Not cruelty. Not arrogance. Not bulldozing people for the sake of ego.
Productive rudeness is the willingness to say the thing that needs to be said, even when it makes you unpopular.
It’s interrupting a meeting that’s going off the rails: “I need to pull us back. We’ve drifted from the decision. What’s the ask here?”
It’s challenging a stakeholder directly: “I hear your request, but I need to push back. This doesn’t solve a user problem we’ve validated.”
It’s naming the elephant: “We’ve been in this meeting for 45 minutes avoiding the real question. Let me ask it: Are we killing this project or not?”
Shy PMs don’t do this. They sit quietly. They let the meeting drift. They wait for someone else to say the hard thing. And then they complain in Slack afterward about how “that meeting was a waste of time.”
You are the meeting. If the meeting was a waste of time, you were a waste of time.
Confusing Kindness with Silence: A Trap
I’m not telling you to be an asshole. The best PMs I know are deeply empathetic, incredibly kind, and genuinely beloved by their teams.
But they are not silent.
And the trap: we conflate kindness with not making waves. We think that being a “good collaborator” means agreeing, smoothing things over, avoiding friction.
Real kindness is telling an engineer their technical approach won’t scale before they waste three sprints building it.
Real kindness is telling a designer that the user research doesn’t support their direction before they invest a month in high-fidelity mocks.
Real kindness is telling leadership that the strategy is flawed before the company burns through a quarter of runway.
That kindness is uncomfortable. It requires you to say things that people don’t want to hear. It requires you to be the villain in a meeting so you can be a hero in the outcome.
Shy PMs avoid this discomfort. And they pay for it in failed launches, wasted effort, and the slow death of user trust.
“Visibility”: It is the truth of the job
Nobody will admit this out loud: Product management is a performance.
Not in the shallow, self-promotional sense. In the literal sense. Your job is to perform conviction. Your job is to perform leadership in rooms full of people with competing interests who all want to do their own thing.
If no one sees you do this, it didn’t happen.
How many brilliant PMs around us (maybe incl. you) get passed over for promotion because they did everything right, quietly. They built conviction in DMs. They won alignment in 1:1s. They solved problems before meetings so the meetings were “smooth.”
And then someone louder, with half the skill, stood up in a room, said something obvious, and got the credit.
This isn’t fair. It’s also reality.
Your Job: Stop hiding. If you won the room in a 1:1, win it again publicly so leadership sees it happen. If you solved a problem, tell the story of how it got solved. If you made a hard call, make that call visible.
This isn’t self-promotion, I name it leadership. The difference is intent: Are you making noise so people see you, or so people see the work? One is ego. One is strategy.
Proactive PM: It is a tactic of being LOUD
In fact, what separates good PMs from great ones. It’s not just being loud when challenged.
It’s being loud before the challenge arrives.
A great PM doesn’t wait for the exec standup to form a point of view. They already have one and they’ve already circulated it. They don’t wait for the roadmap review to surface a trade-off. They surface it two weeks early, in writing, so they control the framing.
A reactive PM responds when cornered. A proactive PM sets the agenda.
If you’re waiting to be asked, you’ve already lost the room. The PM worth promoting is the one who showed up with a position before anyone thought to request one.
A Real Test for You
Do it this week if you’ve time.
Go back to the last three meetings where a decision was made that you disagreed with. Ask yourself:
Did I say anything?
Did I push back?
Did I make my case?
Or did I sit silently and complain later?
Now look at your calendar for next week. Find the meeting where you know something needs to be said, something uncomfortable, something that might make you unpopular.
Say it.
Not aggressively. Not rudely. But clearly, directly, and without hedge.
Watch what happens. Either you’ll be right and you’ll change the outcome, or you’ll be wrong and you’ll learn something. Either way, you’ll have done your job.
Because the reality after all these years with product management: It is not a quiet profession. It’s not a job for people who want to sit in the back and do good work and hope someone notices.
It’s a job for people who are willing to be wrong out loud.
It’s a job for people who fight for their users, their roadmap, and their conviction in rooms where fighting is uncomfortable.
It’s a job for people who understand that the only thing worse than saying something stupid is saying nothing at all.
So open your mouth.
Next Round
How to be loud with AI and in the era of AI Agents. Can you even do that?
