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Welcome to the 8th issue of The Street Smart Edge, the free version of my newsletter, Street Smart Product Manager, to help you boost your confidence, stay focused, and reconnect with what really matters. Upgrade to a paid subscription or Inner Circle Membership for in-depth, practical insights, templates, and career development toolkits to transform your impact and how stakeholders perceive your value.
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How Canva, Perplexity and Notion turn feedback chaos into actionable customer intelligence
Support tickets, reviews, and survey responses pile up faster than you can read.
Enterpret unifies all feedback, auto-tags themes, and ties insights to revenue, CSAT, and NPS, helping product teams find high-impact opportunities.
→ Canva: created VoC dashboards that aligned all teams on top issues.
→ Perplexity: set up an AI agent that caught revenue‑impacting issues, cutting diagnosis time by hours.
→ Notion: generated monthly user insights reports 70% faster.
Stop manually tagging feedback in spreadsheets. Keep all customer interactions in one hub and turn them into clear priorities that drive roadmap, retention, and revenue.
Product Management feels exhausting right now. One minute you’re told to master AI and “vibe coding.” The next, you’re expected to be a “full stack PM”… whatever that means.
In the midst of this craziness, most PMs are feel stuck, acting like delivery managers instead of business leaders. You’d love to be strategic, but you’re buried in Jira tickets. If you’re treated like a task doer, how can you be expected to drive growth?
The real problem isn’t AI. Nor is it hoping your company develops a “product mindset.” It’s that most organizations define the role poorly.
Your Job Isn’t to Build Stuff. It’s to Grow the Business.
Yes, shipping features is a big part of what you do. But that’s not what you’re getting paid for. You’re paid to create monetizable customer value.
Every product decision needs to meet two conditions:
It solves a real problem for the customer.
It returns measurable ROI to the business.
That’s it. Everything else — roadmaps, frameworks, OKRs, even AI — is just means to ends.
If you’re not thinking in terms of revenue, growth, and ROI, you’re not doing product management. You’re doing project management with a fancier title.
Most Companies Don’t Know What Product Managers Do
Over the past 10-15 years, product culture has been ruled by engineers. Agile and the rise of the tech founder turned coding into a religion and CTOs into rockstars. And — let’s be honest — the vast majority of them were men.
Investors and boards poured money into tech mavens who could ship fast and talk “disruption” in their sleep. Technical skill became the ultimate currency, the only true badge of legitimacy.
Soon, every company wanted to act like a tech company. They hired engineers to digitize the business, and those engineers said, “We need someone to write requirements and manage releases.” They got budget approved to hire those people and called them “Product Managers” or, worse, “Product Owner” or “Technical Product Manager.”
And that’s where things went sideways.
Product management, a discipline built on understanding customers, defining vision, and driving business outcomes, got reduced to ticket writing and backlog grooming. Many PMs today are ex-engineers who still value technical know-how over business acumen and people leadership. They’re managing Jira boards, not markets.
And product leaders let it happen. They handed the wheel to technical founders, CTOs, and “Agile consultants” who claimed to know product, but really just knew dev processes.
Is it any surprise then that only 1 in 5 organizations have clearly defined the PM role? The rest just make it up as they go.
This is why you see PMs end up being:
The janitor — cleaning up other people’s messes.
The firefighter — saving projects from bad commitments.
The barista — taking orders from others and serving up features.
This ain’t Product Management
This confusion destroys credibility. When no one knows what PMs do, they assume you do everything no one else wants to do.
That’s why it’s time to redefine your own job. Don’t wait for HR or even your boss to do it for you. They’re just as confused as everyone else.
The Trap
Most PMs spend 80+% of their week in the “build” phase — writing tickets, attending standups, managing releases.
That’s not product management. That’s production management.
Product Management focuses on the full product lifecycle: defining the right problems, validating solutions, preparing go-to-market teams, and ensuring launches actually succeed. Rinse and repeat.
Shipping code isn’t the same as launching a product. A release isn’t a result. It’s just one step in the process of creating business value.
If your product goes live and Sales, Marketing, and Support aren’t ready, you didn’t launch. You just deployed.
AI Won’t Replace You. But It Might Expose You
AI isn’t coming for good Product Managers. It’s coming for the ones who mistake tools for talent.
AI can summarize research, write specs, and analyze data faster than you ever could. But it can’t generate insight. It can’t have a conversation with a frustrated customer and uncover the unspoken problem driving their behavior. (Taco Bell tried and failed.)
That’s your job. If you’re not spending real time with customers, you’re not building judgment. That’s the one thing AI can’t fake.
AI will amplify PMs who know their craft. It will eliminate those who don’t.
Your Takeaway
If you’re a Product Manager:
You don’t need to be everything to everyone.
You don’t need to be available to everyone all the time.
Don’t wait for your company to define your role for you.
At it’s core, your job is to help grow the product by solving real customer problems in ways that make money.
If your calendar, your goals, and your conversations don’t reflect that, you’re not doing product management. You’re managing chaos.
And if you’re a product leader or hiring manager:
Stop chasing trends. Avoid hype-driven role definition and hiring traps.
Define the role and expectations clearly. Audit your current PM role definitions and career ladder.
Evaluate your PMs based on what drives outcomes.
Know what results are important at your company and teach that to your PMs.
Coach your PMs to create measurable impact.
Get back to fundamentals. The PMs and product leaders who master that will outlast every hype cycle. Including this one.
Have a joyful week, and, if you can, make it joyful for someone else too.
cheers,
shardul
Here are 4 ways I can help you today:
Strategy Design Workshop: Transform scattered priorities into clear, actionable direction. I’ll facilitate your team through a customized workshop to align stakeholders and create strategies that actually get executed instead of forgotten. Book a call.
Product Management Audit: Get a clear picture of what’s working and what’s holding your team back. Through a systematic analysis, I’ll evaluate your strategy, processes, roles, metrics, and culture. You’ll walk away a practical set of findings and actionable recommendations to strengthen your product organization. Book a call.
Corporate Training: Elevate your entire product organization. I’ll teach your team how to think and act strategically, craft outcome-driven roadmaps, and dramatically improve how they deliver measurable results that matter to your business. Book a call.
Improv Based Team Building Workshop: Boost creativity, trust, and collaboration through improv. Your team will problem-solve faster and work better together. Book a call.
Shardul Mehta
I ❤️ product managers
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