When a product manager named Kiran came to me for advice, he had almost a decade in the job: startups, consulting, product ownership at IBM, big-time projects with Apple. On every dimension I could observe, he was good at the job too. He could deliver. He could handle stakeholders. And he could run a meeting without people checking their phones. Then I asked him how he decided what to build next, what goes into the roadmap. He described a process that started with what the client asked for and ended with delivering it well.

But that’s not a strategy; it’s a queue of requests. To be clear, he wasn’t doing bad work. This was what was expected of him. He was doing genuinely good work but at the wrong altitude for where a product manager should be, which is much harder to see from the inside.

Many of the product managers I talk to are in similar situations, being fed feature requests from “The Business,” but few of them would use the word “factory” for it.

A feature factory doesn’t feel like a factory when you are standing in one. It feels like being busy. Being busy feels a great deal like being valuable. That feels good right up until the year-end conversation where a leader asks about your impact, and all you have to point to are things project managers should be proud of: features shipped, on time, under budget.

The signs are in plain view, which is why no one sees them

Do these sound familiar?

Roadmaps organized by quarter instead of by outcome. Sprint planning that opens with “what can we fit in?” rather than “what should we solve?” Prioritization meetings where the loudest stakeholder determines the must-haves and everyone agrees that is just how it works here. And success is measured, if at all, by what shipped, never by what improved for customers or the company.

If your team celebrates feature launches and never checks whether the launched thing did anything, you are in one. The only real question left is whether you stay stuck in it or not.

Why being busy feels normal

A feature factory isn’t broken. It is perfectly optimized, just for the wrong thing.

It’s similar to a real factory optimized only for production. An AI & software executive in the steel industry came to me last week with a similar problem: his VP of Operations only cares about keeping their machines running 24/7. But it’s leading to over-production, excess inventory stacked on top of product that needs to get shipped (literally, not digitally), and worsening customer satisfaction. And yet, he thinks he’s doing great. I told the exec that the problem is no measurement of success tied to his work other than output.

Similarly, software organizations that don’t clearly define success for product teams tend to reward output because there is nothing else to measure. Therefore, tickets closed, releases shipped, and Jira items dragged into “done” are the things that get counted as progress. Managers get promoted for teams delivering on time. Engineers get recognized for throughput. Product managers get evaluated on how much their teams shipped and how little of it slipped.

And yet, no one in that chain is measured on whether the customer or your company made more money because of what you built. Not one.

This is not malice, and it is not a conspiracy against you to keep you on the hamster wheel of delivery. It is incentives doing exactly what incentives do, which was the whole subject of the last letter I sent. The system was not designed to trap you, but it does keep your attention on the mechanical parts of the job while the strategic parts sit there unaddressed. That is the profile I see in nearly every stuck career I look at, at companies big and small, B2B and B2C, product and services. Strong on delivery, thin on the connection between the work and the money.

The ladder, and the question that fixes it

I showed that nine-year PM a product metrics ladder for strategic decision-making, and it is the simplest thing in this letter. Every feature should influence a product metric. That metric should connect to a user outcome, and that outcome should map to a business result the customer actually cares about, which then maps to a business result that we care about. Five links. If you cannot articulate all five, you do not have a strategy; you have a task list with visual formatting.

Kiran was building a content management system for Apple Media Services, so his primary users were content managers. His backlog was full of things content managers had asked for, which is a reasonable place for a backlog to come from. The question he was answering was “what do the content managers need?” But the question that actually pays the bills is “how does Apple Media Services help artists (our customers’ customers) succeed, and how could our product make that happen faster?” Potentially the same backlog, very different effect.

Ask yourself, “how can I help my customers make more money so that we make more money?” That’s your job. That’s as simple as I can make it. Sure, there are dozens of variations to that question for B2B vs B2C vs platforms vs etc., and dozens more nuances to answering that question well, i.e., creating a winning strategy. But if you can’t answer it at all, even with a bad answer, then you’re destined to be stuck on the factory floor.

If you can connect logically from the feature sitting in your sprint to an artist getting more listeners on Apple’s platform, then you can defend it in any room you walk into. If you cannot draw that line, then someone else’s priority will take the slot instead, and you won’t have the language to argue for yours.

What to do this week

Audit your last three shipped features and ask whether any of them moved a business metric you were tracking. If you don’t know, that is your first problem. It is not the roadmap or the timeline; it is the measurement, because you cannot escape a feature factory that only measures output. Be the one who changes that. Start measuring (and announcing impact), and others will follow.

If you find yourself on the factory floor, you’re not stuck forever. Look around you for the ladders, and climb up to a higher vantage point. Because the product manager who ships a lot but can’t explain the business impact becomes hard to tell apart from a project manager.

-Brennan

Want to learn how to climb the ladder and escape your factory floor? Join the next cohort of “The Influential PM: Strategy, Stakeholders, Significance.”