Stephanie Leue

Product Leadership ≠ being liked.
You’ll say no more than yes, frustrate smart people, feel lonely. Until you learn: it’s about being respected in this role not being liked and respect shows up later—earned through steady calls + courage, not smiles and likes.

Next time you’re frustrated about working in a feature factory, remember this:

15 years ago at PayPal I wrote 70-page PRDs for everything we wanted engineers to build. Sometimes they even got built.

As a PM, I often learned about releases almost when our customers did—sometimes later.

Here are 5 foolproof ways to win a PM’s heart ❤️:

1.Redesign the product mid-sprint.
2.Suggest a “tiny fix”
3.Drop surprise deadlines out of nowhere.
4.Say the magic words: “This won’t take long.”
5.Share unvalidated "ideas" aka feature requests.

Every PM job says strategy. Every PM calendar screams firefighting.
Bugs, escalations, outages, “quick wins,” endless alignment calls.

Strategy? That’s what’s left after dinner.
If you don’t defend time, it vanishes.

I learned the hard way.
Protect a few hours → it changes your career.

The Ghost in the Job Title: Why Product Management Was Never Alive Except at a handful of dream companies—and why everyone else is faking it.

We were told product managers are “mini-CEOs.” Most PMs inherit the title but not the system. The roadmap becomes a stakeholder wishlist. The calendar fills with escalations and status calls. The result: PM as a ghost. A glorified role: Busy. But rarely strategic.

More: tinyurl.com/Ghostproduct

Eventually I’ve got promoted to CPO today, effective Jan 1st. CPO to IC to CPO in just 7 month. What a rollercoaster. 🚀

Not everyone will like or agree or understand your product strategy and that's fine. How I determine if my strategy is “good enough”?

50% of the team agree and commit.
20% of the team disagree but commit.

And I’m completely okay if:

20% of the team disagree.
10% just don’t care.

5 foolproof ways to win over a PM:
1. Redesign the product mid-sprint.
2. Suggest a "tiny fix."
3. Drop surprise deadlines.
4. Say, "This won’t take long."
5. Make everything "critical."

The C-suite lives and breathes strategy, but for teams on the ground, it’s often unclear. While execs focus daily on evolving strategy, teams only get the highlights—usually in an all-hands or workshop. These snapshots can’t capture the depth, leading to inevitable disconnects.

You think saying "no" is tough as a Product Manager? Bad news: It gets harder as a product leader— suddenly it's about making tough calls, cutting projects, shifting resources, prioritizing impact. What helps? Data-driven decisions, clear communication and relationships based on trust.

Product Managers love nothing more then execs giving design feedback.

No matter how amazing the feature you just launched is, at least one person will have an idea for additional functionality or improvements to the design.

Welcome to product management. Where great is never enough, and we are constantly “motivated” to improve.

So we're renaming War Time CEO now to founder mode so it sounds more charming?

Product has a reputation challenge: We craft beautiful roadmaps but struggle with slow delivery due to complexity/ dependencies. Most teams also overpromise in terms of impact but underdeliver. Yet we move on to the next shiny thing. This leads to doubt about PM value across the organization.

The Product team works agile.
The Engineering team works agile.
The Marketing team works agile.
The CX team works agile.
The other teams work agile.

But when everyone works siloed it’s just agile theater, where companies pretend to be cutting-edge while in reality they are super slow.

THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO AGILE

1. Every project is broken up into five phases: Disco, Alpaca, Beatings, Live, Regret

2. Every project has a Delivery Manager (DM) and a Product Manager (PM) who fuel the project through their mutual hatred and constant bickering

The Iceberg that explains why product strategy fails It shows that there are things hidden, that affect an efficient execution.

Product strategy looks brilliant on paper. Until you have to execute it.

If you are a product leader who has become frustrated with your strategy's progress. THIS IS WHY! ⬇️