Put That Down, You Don't Need It
Part One: The Human Jenga Tower
There's a moment that happens in every product manager's career—usually around year three, sometimes sooner if you're unlucky—when you realize you've become a human Jenga tower. Every new request, every "quick ask," every "just this once" commitment gets stacked on top of the previous one until you're swaying precariously, one breath away from complete collapse.
I watch this happen almost every week. A PM eating cold takeout as part of a daily caloric deficit, frantically updating three different stakeholders about five different initiatives while simultaneously trying to review user discovery for a sixth. When I asked how she was doing, she looked up with the hollow stare of someone who'd forgotten what weekends were for and said, "Fine. Just shit everywhere. Sorry—just a lot going on." Insert wan smile. Fun.
That's when I knew she'd fallen into the same trap that gets us all: the belief that saying yes to everything makes you indispensable. The truth is, it makes you disposable. Because when you're spread across seventeen different priorities, you're not really managing any of them—you're just the person who gets blamed when they fall apart, probably inevitably.
The Performance of Maximum Capacity
Change my mind: we're each exactly as busy as we choose to be. That frantic energy, that perpetual overwhelm, that breathless recitation of everything on your plate—it's not happening to you. You're doing it yourself. And somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that this performance of busyness was actually a form of social currency.
Watch how people respond when you ask them how things are going. "Insane!" "Crazy Busy" they say, with a mixture of exhaustion and pride. "Absolutely slammed." "Drowning, but in a good way." As if being scattered across innumerable priorities was proof of their importance rather than evidence of their inability to prioritize.
The truth is, being busy provides far less value than we imagine. Most of the frantic motion, the urgent emails, the back-to-back meetings that could have been Slack threads—it's organizational theater. Motion designed to create the illusion of progress while actual progress happens in the quiet moments between the chaos.
The Cautionary Tale
I (re)learned this the hard way during my stint at a foodservice inventory management startup. We were building something genuinely innovative—helping restaurants optimize ordering and reduce costs. But the CEO had a particular gift (as most do) for making every request sound both urgent and critical. New dashboard for sales managers? Absolutely critical. Complete redesign of the mobile ordering interface? Mission-critical. Integration with seventeen different POS systems? You guessed it—critical.
By month eight, our product team was managing over thirty different "critical" initiatives simultaneously. Our sprint planning sessions looked like air traffic control during a storm—everyone talking over each other, nothing landing safely. Nothing shipped on time. Everything was buggy. And the irony? We were failing at everything because we were trying to succeed at everything.
The worst part wasn't the late nights or the forgotten meals or the strained personal relationships. It was watching talented people turn into hollow-eyed efficiency machines, apologizing for chaos they didn't create while pretending everything was manageable. We'd become an assembly line of perpetual firefighting, each person frantically passing half-completed work to the next, everyone convinced that if they just worked a little harder, stayed a little later, said yes to just one more thing, it would all somehow come together.
But it never did. Because you can't optimize your way out of a prioritization problem. You can't efficiency your way through a strategy crisis. And you certainly can't say yes to everything and expect anything to turn out well.
Next: Put That Down, You Don't Need It, Part Two: The Radical Act of Strategic Subtraction
Put That Down, You Don't Need It, Part Two: The Radical Act of Strategic Subtraction
Previously, we talked about how product managers become human Jenga towers, stacking commitments until collapse becomes inevitable. Today: the way out.
That's when I (re)discovered strategic subtraction, though I can't take credit for the concept. I learned it from the owner of a renowned design firm I had the honor of working for back in the day. He had this surfer vibe about life and design—minimalist, zen—while at the same time always delivering work that was utterly and completely satisfying. His idea of optimizing, whether for life or design, was removing things until it was just right. He was a disciple of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, always quoting that line about perfection being achieved not when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to take away.
Watching him work was like watching someone sculpt by removal. He'd look at a design, or a process, or even a conversation, and somehow have the confidence to begin reducing. Not dramatic, sweeping changes—just quiet, iterative, deliberate subtraction until what remained was exactly what was needed and nothing more.
It's the radical act of deliberately doing less so you can accomplish more. It's not about being lazy or uncommitted. It's about being ruthlessly honest about what actually matters and having the spine to say no to everything else.
Practicing Strategic Subtraction
Practicing it can often feel like career suicide. The CEO of the foodservice startup had requested a dashboard feature that would let him track seventeen different metrics in real-time. Instead of the usual "sure, we'll get that in the next sprint," I suggested maybe not. I asked him to walk me through the actual problem he was trying to solve.
Turns out, he needed to know one thing: which customers were most likely to churn based on ordering patterns. The seventeen-metric dashboard was his solution. The real solution was a single, well-designed alert system that took a third of the time to build and actually solved his problem.
But here's the thing about saying no: it's not just about protecting your own sanity (though that's important). It's about creating clarity for everyone around you. When you stop being the person who says yes to everything, you become the person who can be counted on to deliver the things that actually matter.
This is where most people get it backwards. They think saying no makes them difficult, uncooperative, not a team player. But the opposite is true. The person who says yes to everything is the one who's not playing for the team—they're playing for their own anxiety, their own need to be liked, their own inability to distinguish between what's urgent and what's important.
Signals Up and Down the Line
Every time you say yes to something trivial, you're broadcasting a message. To your team, you're saying their time is disposable. To your stakeholders, you're saying you can't distinguish between strategy and busy work. To your leadership, you're saying you don't understand what moves the business forward. And to yourself, you're saying your boundaries are just suggestions.
But when you start saying no—strategically, thoughtfully, with data to back it up—the signals change. Your team starts to trust that when you ask them to work on something, it's genuinely important. Your stakeholders begin to respect your judgment because you're not just a delivery mechanism; you're a strategic filter. Your leadership starts to see you as someone who understands the bigger picture, not just someone who can execute tasks.
And here's the part that took me years to understand: saying no creates opportunities for others. When you delegate that project you would have halfheartedly managed, you're giving someone else the chance to truly own it. When you delay that feature that's not quite ready, you're creating space for your team to do their best work instead of rushing toward mediocrity.
Jennifer's Transformation
I watched this play out with Jennifer, a PM at a very large retailer I used to work for. She aspired, unsuccessfully for a long time, to become a Senior PM. She was also the person who worked every weekend, responded to Campfire (look it up) messages at midnight, and had that particular brand of exhausted pride that comes from being indispensable in all the wrong ways.
Then she had her moment—sitting in the parking ramp eating a disfigured protein bar that had given itself over to the shape of its wrapper she'd kept in the center console of her Toyota Tercel between sobs before finally deciding to go home. She'd spent the entire day in meetings about work instead of actually doing any work, and the realization hit her that this wasn't sustainable, wasn't strategic, and certainly wasn't getting her promoted.
The next morning, she started saying no. Not to everything, but to the right things. The difference was immediate and a little unsettling for those of us who'd grown accustomed to her reflexive availability.
The Fear vs. The Reality
The biggest barrier to strategic subtraction isn't logistical—it's psychological. We're convinced that saying no will get us fired. But in my experience, the opposite is true. People get fired for failing to deliver results, not for being thoughtful about what they commit to.
I've seen more careers destroyed by overcommitment than underdelivery. The PM who promises everything and delivers nothing gets shown the door. The PM who carefully selects what to work on and then actually ships it gets promoted.
The key is measurement. When you can clearly articulate what you're working on, why it matters, and how you'll know if it's working, saying no becomes easy. It's not personal preference or laziness—it's resource optimization backed by data.
Next: Put That Down, You Don't Need It, Part Three: The Tools
Put That Down, You Don't Need It (Part 3): The Practical Tools
We've covered the problem (human Jenga towers) and the solution (strategic subtraction). Now: how to actually make this work in practice.
The Delegation Multiplier
What doesn't get taught in product management boot camps is that your job isn't just to manage products—it's to develop product managers. Every time you take on work that someone else could do (possibly better), you're robbing them of a growth opportunity and yourself of the chance to focus on work that actually requires your experience.
Tom, a junior PM, used to sit in meetings looking like he was taking notes but was actually playing Wordle. Not because he was lazy, but because he never got to own anything meaningful. Everything interesting got escalated to someone else. So he spent his days updating Jira tickets and attending status meetings—important work, sure, but not the kind that builds judgment or strategic thinking.
When we started delegating real responsibility—not just tasks, but decisions—Tom transformed. He began asking better questions in discovery sessions. He started challenging assumptions instead of just documenting them. He learned to say no to stakeholders when they requested features that didn't align with user needs. In six months, he went from note-taker to strategic contributor.
And here's the beautiful irony: by giving Tom more responsibility, we created more space for ourselves to focus on the work that needed our skills and experience—the cross-functional alignment, the strategic planning, the difficult conversations with leadership about trade-offs and timelines.
But delegation isn't just dumping work on someone else's plate. It's creating space for people to grow while creating clarity about who owns what. When everyone knows their lane, when expectations are clear, when success is defined upfront—that's when teams start humming instead of grinding.
Strategic Delay: The Art of Productive Procrastination
This brings us to strategic delay—not the practice of slowing down to speed up, but something more specific and useful. It's a personal strategy for how to prioritize things down the list because they have lower impact, need more discovery, or are likely to evaporate under the glare of daily pressure.
Most requests that feel urgent aren't. They're just loud. And most loud requests, when subjected to even mild scrutiny, reveal themselves to be solutions in search of problems, or problems that solve themselves given enough time.
In one instance, we had three different stakeholders requesting variations of the same reporting feature. Each one was convinced their version was critical, urgent, couldn't wait. Instead of building three different solutions immediately, we delayed all of them for two weeks while we did actual user research.
Two of the requests were trying to solve problems that our existing analytics already addressed—the stakeholders just didn't know how to access the data. The third was valid, but much simpler than originally described. What would have been three sprints of development became one afternoon of training and one day of building a simple export function.
Strategic delay isn't about being slow. It's about being smart. It's recognizing that some problems solve themselves, some requirements clarify themselves, and some urgent requests reveal themselves to be neither urgent nor necessary when given the chance to breathe.
The key is being transparent about the delay. Don't just say "we'll get to it eventually." Explain what you're waiting for: "Let's give this two weeks to see if the pattern holds." "I want to validate this with actual user research before we build it." "This feels like it might be solving a symptom rather than the cause. Let's dig deeper."
The Measurement Imperative
None of this works without measurement, but not the kind of measurement we usually obsess over. Don't measure how busy you are, measure how effective you are. Don't track how many features you ship, track how much value you create.
I use the standard arsenal—Jira, planning sessions, daily standups, one-on-ones—but for my own lists I use Notion. It generates a sort of sanity field for me every time I open it, this protective zone of clarity where I can actually think about what I'm accomplishing versus what I'm just doing. Away from the noise of Teams notifications and sprint velocity charts, I can connect the dots between activity and impact in a way that all the other tools somehow obscure. But that's me. There's a tool out there for you. Guaranteed.
Jennifer took this much further. She built a Google Form backed to a Sheet where she quickly records her work as "Win," "Learn," or "Challenge," each sized as "Big," "Medium," or "Small." Every week, she feeds this data to GPT to chart and summarize her personal velocity and trajectory. Then she adjusts accordingly—more nos, more yeses, strategic delays—like minithrusters on a docking capsule, making tiny course corrections to stay aligned with her goals.
The data tells a story, and the story is almost always the same: teams that focus on fewer things deliver more value. Companies that say no strategically grow faster than companies that say yes reflexively. People who measure impact outlast people who measure activity.
The Long Game
The hardest part about strategic subtraction is that it requires playing the long game in a short-game world. Your quarterly reviews might look sparse compared to the person who shipped seventeen features (even if none of them moved the needle). Your velocity metrics might be lower than the team that built everything on the backlog (even if most of it was never used).
But here's what I've learned after many years of watching careers rise and fall in this industry: the people who last, who grow, who eventually run things—they're not the ones who said yes to everything. They're the ones who learned to say no strategically, who built teams instead of just shipping features, who measured impact instead of output.
Put That Down
So here's my take, from someone who's made these mistakes so you don't have to: put that down. Whatever that extra thing is that you're carrying around—the project that doesn't quite fit, the commitment you made when you were feeling optimistic, the task that someone else could do better—put it down.
You don't need it.
What you need is clarity about what matters, the courage to say no to what doesn't, and the patience to measure what you're actually accomplishing instead of just tracking what you're doing.
Your team will thank you. Your stakeholders will respect you. Your leadership will notice you. And the person who eventually takes your job when you get promoted? They'll have a roadmap for how to be effective instead of just busy.