Make Things Happen
A Call to Product Managers.
It takes pace, resourcefulness and resilience to make things happen. You need to bring urgency to understanding your market, solving customer problems and capturing value. You need to be creative with constraints, push through resistance and work around blockers. You need to keep going when things don’t go to plan, when your first attempt fails and when others start to lose hope. Great product managers don’t wait for perfect conditions; they find a way to make things happen.
You will rarely get to operate in perfect conditions. Individuals, teams and organisations take time to adapt to their environment, so sub-optimal conditions are to be expected. Treat them as part of the terrain, then work out how you can still influence success from where you are. Do not be a victim of organisational immaturity, silos, unclear strategy or scarce resources. Product managers who make things happen find energy in challenging environments, find a way to make progress despite them and stand out because of it.
Pace
Bring pace without creating panic by fostering genuine urgency. Don’t just focus on delivery, remain genuinely curious. Don’t drop quality, maintain craft. Speed doesn’t need to be reckless; test assumptions early and you can discover reality sooner. Move briskly through reversible decisions, and consider your options deliberately as decisions become harder to reverse. Waiting for certainty is the most pervasive and unnecessary form of time wasting. Turn questions into action, action into evidence, and evidence into decisions. Ask what do we need to know, and what is the quickest reliable way to find out? Make progress each and every day with the people and information available; when colleagues go on holiday, work should continue. Speak to a customer, look at the data, test a smaller version. Pace is not rushing blindly; it is shortening the distance between what you do not know and what you can learn.
Resourcefulness
Be resourceful when the obvious path is blocked. Look for the side door by asking what smaller version of the idea could work, who else has solved a similar problem, what you could do manually before building properly, or which constraint is real rather than assumed. Think around corners: what will slow this down, who will block it, what will be missing, and how can you solve that now? If you cannot get the full team, find one person who can help. If you cannot get the perfect data, find a useful signal. If you cannot get agreement on the whole plan, get agreement on the next step. Resourcefulness is finding another route forward instead of stopping at the first closed door. Constraints are not stop signs; they signal it’s time to get creative.
Resilience
When things do not go to plan, pause long enough to learn from it, then go again. Ask what assumption was wrong, what signal you missed, what you would do differently and what still matters. Do not treat failure as proof that the outcome is impossible. Treat it as information about the path you chose. Great product managers are stubborn about the outcome and flexible about how they get there. When the first attempt fails, change the angle rather than simply trying the same thing again. Keep going when progress is slow, messy or demoralising.
Don’t Take It Too Far.
Many people don’t do enough to make things happen, but taking this concept to the limit is dangerous. Take on work that falls between the gaps, but don’t become the hero who saves every project. Lead by example and set high standards, but don’t push your work onto others. Challenge fake blockers and respect genuine ones. Navigate the process pragmatically, but respect your organisation’s principles, values and appetite for risk. Operate with integrity.
The best product managers create a team with the same mindset. They raise the tempo, challenge excuses, and show people that most blockers have a way through, around or underneath them. Over time, making progress becomes part of the team’s muscle memory, not something that depends on one person pushing every decision forward.
Are you really driving things forward, or waiting behind good excuses? What can you do today to make progress on the most important thing? Great product managers make things happen.