10 Deadly Sins of a Junior Product Manager

This article was originally published on habr.com.

These «deadly sins» can serve as a self-assessment checklist for both new and more experienced managers.

Here are the mistakes — and how to fix them.

1. Believing in Multitasking

Every product manager faces enormous flows of information — countless initiatives and product ideas that no single person can process in the time available. Stakeholders push their agendas, users complain, the calendar is packed with meetings, and the Product Backlog keeps growing day after day.

Instead of focusing on the tasks that truly matter for the product, a junior manager spreads their time and energy thin across a wide range of goals. The core mistake is failing to understand that attention is a limited resource — there simply isn’t enough of it to handle everything. This resource gets depleted both when we’re actively pursuing a goal and when we’re just keeping a task alive in our severely limited working memory.

It’s worth remembering that «attention is a significantly limited process. When additional tasks arise, it becomes exhausted — and if those tasks are complex, it’s exhausted quickly» [9]. Good time management comes down to two simple principles:

1. First, write down every unfinished task [1].
2. Every thought rattling around in your head consumes «mental fuel» (a brilliant phrase coined by Maxim Dorofeev). «If we can build habits that let us write tasks down instead of trying to remember them, we can live not just more effectively, but more calmly» [2].

And the old Russian proverb — «chase two rabbits and you’ll catch neither» — says exactly the same thing.

How to fix it:

1. Ruthlessly eliminate multitasking [12].
2. Accept the reality of the job: it’s normal for stakeholders to want everything at once; it’s normal to have a Product Backlog stretching a year or more out; it’s normal to focus on what matters and not spend your attention on lower-priority items.
3. Build the habit of writing down all ideas and tasks — in text or visual form. The goal is to avoid losing information, avoid overloading your working memory, and stop wasting your attention unnecessarily.
4. Focus on the product strategy if one exists; if it doesn’t (which happens) — agree on the key priorities for the coming quarter with your product lead. For anything outside the product strategy, learn to say «no» politely.
5. Remember that effective work requires energy and a good state of mind — which depend directly on quality sleep, nutrition, physical activity, adequate vitamins, and rest in all its forms.
6. Keep in mind something that seems obvious but is often overlooked: if you invest time in learning time management tools and choose a few that work for you — like the Pomodoro Technique or keeping a daily to-do list — it will meaningfully improve your productivity.

2. Fear of Making Decisions

A product manager is the driving force behind a product’s growth, and experience, decisiveness, boldness, and ambition largely determine how successful that product will be in the market. Yet junior managers are often afraid to make even decisions that have virtually no direct impact on the product strategy.

Even mild indecisiveness slows down product development and hurts quality. And if a product manager is afraid to make decisions in high-stakes situations — or keeps deferring them or offloading responsibility to others — this will inevitably lead to the project’s failure and, ultimately, to a derailed career [3].

Indecisiveness often hides behind the guise of running yet another product experiment or testing yet another hypothesis. Instead of moving the product forward quickly and getting it in front of users, there’s an endless cycle of research under the banner of product hypotheses.

Product management requires specific qualities and knowledge that develop over time. But one of the key ingredients of a successful PM is character — the ability to get things done, including making mistakes early on and learning from them.

A PM needs to honestly assess their strengths and weaknesses and actively work on the latter, rather than burying the problem. For example, if someone is afraid of public speaking or struggles to hold their own at the negotiating table, they need to overcome that fear through training, self-work — and maybe even therapy.

It’s important to remember that experience is built through trial and error. After a bad decision, you’ll have to make another important call. And if you get it wrong again — that’s okay, because you’re accumulating knowledge: the classic principle of quantity turning into quality, and professional skill improving with each iteration.

How to fix it:

1. Keep the outcomes you’re aiming for — and the core business goal — constantly in mind. I’ve seen it many times, and fallen into this trap myself: in the midst of a creative problem-solving process, the original goal gets lost, and the solution you land on is «wonderful» — but doesn’t actually get you where you need to go.
2. Different decisions carry different levels of consequences, and often «we can fix a mistake in just a few hours. In other cases, the consequences can put the product or the entire business at risk» [4]. For high-stakes decisions, it’s better to make them in the morning, when your «mental fuel» or «psychic energy» [5] is at its fullest.

3. Making Decisions Alone

The opposite extreme is making important product decisions unilaterally, without consulting colleagues or leadership. I’ve seen this play out many times: a PM makes a product decision without discussing it with the relevant stakeholders, and only after the release do the flaws surface — flaws that then have to be hurriedly patched.

How to fix it:

1. Don’t be shy about discussing problems and solutions with colleagues. Set your professional ego aside. Good advice can only help you — and there’s nothing wrong with turning to people who have relevant experience and have already navigated situations like yours. Those people aren’t just your managers; often they’re people in operational roles who have more hands-on experience with these issues than your boss does [6]. Moreover, when decisions are made collaboratively — and disagreements are resolved through testing and open discussion — a PM signals to the team that their input matters, which contributes to a healthy working environment [4].
2. Keep in mind that any help is only good in moderation. Don’t shift decision-making responsibility onto your colleagues or delegate away your own authority. «Unnecessary help is harmful — that is, if I ask someone for help in dealing with circumstances I should handle myself, I seriously damage my belief in my own abilities» [3]. This is worth reflecting on: how do you strike the balance between accepting help and remaining independent in your work?

4. Not Going All In

It’s important for a junior PM to be curious, to learn eagerly, and to approach not just product skills but general management skills with genuine enthusiasm.

That said, it’s worth remembering that even the best courses are no guarantee of success. Knowledge gained through training can actually become a trap for newcomers — and PMs in particular — because what’s taught often differs fundamentally from what the job actually involves.

I’ve met many specialists who were sold on the «romance of product management» through PM courses, but who were completely unprepared for the day-to-day reality of the work. In contrast, people who learn everything on their own and work on products with genuine enthusiasm and fire in their eyes stand out clearly.

So it’s worth asking yourself: «Is this actually what I want to be doing right now — with full commitment and 200% engagement? Or not?» If not — don’t waste your time; go find what inspires you.

And if the answer is yes, then remember: «Your work must have three qualities: it should be something you have a natural aptitude for, something you find deeply interesting, and something that gives you the opportunity to do great work» [7].

How to fix it:

1. In one interview, Alexander Gorny talked about how working 80 hours a week at Mail.Ru Group helped him build his career and learn to genuinely love his work. He even recommended that every early-career professional try working at that pace for at least a year. That’s the honest truth — so:
2. Set yourself an ambitious, bold professional goal — one that motivates you to be relentless (especially toward yourself) in pursuit of it. The goal can be anything: earning a new title, making your product a market leader, becoming a head of product. Working 80 hours a week without a goal is hard labor; with a goal, it’s just the grind of chasing a dream.
3. Recognize that the company has more experienced people you can learn from. If that’s hard to accept, recall the saying attributed to Confucius: «If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.»
4. Treat work tasks as opportunities to build volume and develop your product skills step by step. That way, your workplace becomes a lab, and tasks become hands-on practice. Solving real problems is far more engaging — and far better for professional development — than working through case studies. But don’t try to do it all at once: follow the principle that the journey is walked one step at a time. Building knowledge and skills gradually, little by little, is far more effective for reaching your goals than trying something once, getting burned, and stopping.

5. Following the Rules Without Question

What sets great managers apart is a low tolerance for bureaucracy and formalism. Many people write documentation because «that’s what you do» — not because it helps them think through requirements more carefully. They stick to «the rules» even when those rules slow down product development, rather than finding informal ways to get things done.

In short — they’re afraid to break rules someone set up somewhere along the way, or they simply don’t notice opportunities to improve those rules. In doing so, they limit their ability to find new, effective approaches to problems. Paul Graham has noted that one of the hallmarks of great work is «informality. Informality means focusing on what matters, not what doesn’t.» [7]

How to fix it:

1. Develop critical thinking and self-awareness at work. Question any idea rather than blindly deferring to someone else’s opinion or an established process. Look for flaws in the logic of how things work and in how others make their arguments. This requires being alert, focused, and energized — both physically and mentally. At the same time, it’s important to distinguish healthy analysis and critique from mere fault-finding.
2. Develop your observational sense. Don’t hesitate to watch how colleagues work, ask questions, and reflect on what you see. If you notice someone else’s mistakes, don’t criticize them harshly — but do discuss what seems off or unclear to you. That’s genuinely valuable. Observing others is a way to accumulate priceless experience — as long as you approach it with goodwill, not with the aim of exposing flaws or boosting your own ego.

6. Prioritizing Form Over Substance

Junior PMs and course students often ask for templates for the «perfect» presentation, Product Roadmap, Customer Journey Map, or other work artifact. But the point isn’t the tools or templates — it’s the content. A great presentation can be drafted in a notebook; a Roadmap can be sketched in pencil on a sheet of paper.

Writing coherent, well-structured prose is harder than drawing a few boxes and connecting them with arrows. That’s exactly why the work of junior managers or students in management courses so often contains «volumes of information» that are padding — content that ignores the rules of logic and ultimately says nothing.

How to fix it:

1. Default to the simplest tools so you can focus on content rather than presentation. Don’t count on an impressive-looking format to solve the problem — it’s more likely to distract from it. Use a sheet of paper or a plain text document with no unnecessary elements or graphics.
2. Let principles from adjacent engineering fields — more formal disciplines — guide your day-to-day product work. «Less is more» [10] from software development, for instance. Or «KISS (Keep It Short and Simple)» — a principle that originated in U.S. Navy engineering culture and found a very comfortable home in software development and UX design.

7. Not Talking to Users

I often encounter product managers who don’t independently study the users of the product they’re building. Some don’t use their own product and don’t talk to users at all — even when the company has dedicated UX researchers or even entire research teams who are ready to help organize the process or offer guidance.

A few years ago, I read an article called «From Managing Products To Managing Product Managers» [11] that significantly shaped how I approach new products. The author gives a brilliant piece of advice to junior PMs: «A new product manager should know the product’s users better than any other employee within the first three months on the job.»

Understanding users allows you to become their advocate and make decisions grounded in the real problems and needs of the people who actually use the product. This is especially important for managers who’ve recently joined a team or taken on a new product. Without it, a PM starts making decisions based on their own — or someone else’s — assumptions, and that’s toxic for the product.

How to fix it:

1. Get to know your UX research team if your company has one. Learn firsthand about the research methods they can support — and chances are, they can help you design the research itself too.
2. Set aside a fixed time slot once a week to talk to users. Build that practice consistently: study and segment your audience, collect the problems they’re running into, and get a real understanding of their needs.

8. Not Studying Competitors

When developing a new product, junior specialists often see competitive analysis as unnecessary — studying what competitors have achieved or figured out feels like overkill. This is a serious mistake. You need to «know your competitor by face,» as it were — to be ready to compete effectively for users in the market.

A PM who isn’t watching competitors — who are always there — is taking a significant risk of losing, because users may simply choose a product that serves their needs better.

I’m not advocating mindlessly copying what others have done. But looking at how your competitors have solved similar problems, both in your local market and internationally, is never a waste of time.

What surprises me most is when PMs delegate competitive analysis to the research team instead of doing it themselves. And it’s equally disappointing when a manager ships a feature that’s worse than what key competitors offer — simply because they couldn’t be bothered to look at the market.

How to fix it:

1. Study the top 10 direct competitors in your product space by market share.
2. Become a user of your competitors’ products, not just your own — experience them firsthand.
3. Subscribe to competitors’ newsletters so you find out about their promotions and new features as they happen.
4. When designing new functionality, look at how competitors have approached the same problem.

9. Thinking in Constraints

I often see junior managers who can’t escape the box of existing limitations — their ideas never venture beyond what’s already established as the norm.

If a junior manager keeps thinking in terms of constraints, in two or three years they’ll become an expert at making excuses and will stop taking on any real challenges. But if they learn to think in terms of possibilities and paths to achieving goals, they’ll develop the ability to imagine genuinely new products.

Boxed in by rules and self-imposed norms, a PM cuts off their own future — they won’t grow, won’t build a career, and won’t find satisfaction in their work.

How to fix it:

1. Deliberately and consciously work to shed constraints. Approach a task with fresh eyes and a clear mind. That’s when you start to see new paths forward and unconventional opportunities.
2. Be creative. Give your imagination room to run — but don’t get so carried away that you lose touch with reality. Remember that your goal is to imagine and advance a real product, but to do it in a non-obvious way.
3. Learn to surprise your target audience. Offer them not just a quality product, but deliver it in a way that’s genuinely different from what competitors are doing.
4. Be fearless. Develop critical thinking. Compare your own progress over time against your past performance and against your peers. Draw conclusions, take the best of what you see — and always try to make it your own rather than simply copying it.

10. Thinking in Tasks

Junior PMs often operate in a mode of «implement the task» brought to them by a stakeholder, rather than identifying the root of the problem and either designing the most effective solution for it or formulating a set of hypotheses to explore.

Refusing to do anything on autopilot — never executing a task without thinking — is the foundation of product culture and product thinking.

How to fix it:

1. Don’t allow yourself to simply execute tasks handed down by others. «If you ever do great work, it will probably be your own project» [7].
2. Be independent. Analyze the goals you’re given, push yourself to actually solve them, and find your own paths to doing so — even if your early attempts aren’t the best.
3. Never rush into executing a task without thinking it through. Give yourself time to understand it properly, and don’t let anyone rush you when you know you haven’t fully grasped what’s being asked.
4. Never propose solutions you haven’t thought through yourself — even if someone hands you a ready-made answer on a silver platter. Always rely on your own judgment, and don’t doubt your ability to get there.

No one walks into a profession and succeeds from day one. Experience, skill, knowledge, and ability are built up gradually — through trial and error that, if you’re willing, you can correct and learn from. The road is made by walking.

Never lose heart, and always remember: nothing is impossible — because «the impossible just takes a little longer than the possible» (F. Nansen).

References

[1] David Allen. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

[2] Maxim Dorofeev. Jedi Techniques: How to Train Your Monkey, Empty Your Inbox, and Preserve Your Mental Fuel. (Russian-language productivity book)

[3] Types of decision-making fears drawn from The Fear of Deciding by renowned Italian psychotherapist Giorgio Nardone.

[4] Based on Marty Cagan’s article on product decision-making, «Coaching – Decisions,» published on the SVPG blog.

[5] Based on Arnold Modell’s article «The Concept of Psychic Energy,» published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. This author is, to my knowledge, the first to have introduced the term «psychic energy.»

[6] Based on the business novel by Dennis Bakke, The Decision Maker: Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Time. A wonderful short story about building a company culture where everyone makes decisions — what I’d call a «product culture.»

[7] Based on Paul Graham’s essay «How to Do Great Work,» which I’d recommend to anyone starting out in any field.

[8] Quote from Theodor Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin.

[9] Based on Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.

[10] Based on the chapter «The Rise of Worse is Better» from Richard P. Gabriel’s Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big.

[11] Refers to the article «From Managing Products To Managing Product Managers» by Chris Jones, co-author of Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products, published on the SVPG blog.

[12] Based on Theo Compernolle’s BrainChains: Discover Your Brain, to Unleash Its Full Potential in a Hyperconnected, Multitasking World.