The myth of process in product work

Imagine someone who wants to build muscle (how I wish that were me!). They look at bodybuilders and think, This is obvious. You pick something heavy up, and you put it down. Why would you need to learn anything about it? Why would you need routines, progression, or form?

Or they look at someone with an impressive physique and conclude the opposite: It can’t be that simple. There must be magic involved. Intuition. Genetics. Some natural body type that just responds to weights. The idea that this outcome could be the result of following routines, breaking down steps, and doing unglamorous work over time feels implausible.

I’ve seen the same thing happen working with people at startups who have never practiced product management craft before. Sometimes, even hearing about “a process” is enough to trigger resistance. Especially with innovative or successful products, people who’ve never done this work tend to mythologize it. They assume there was no process. That it was intuition. That it just happened. That there’s no way to describe it, let alone reproduce it.

What’s going on?

If you’ve read even a little about how products actually get built, you know that isn’t true. At the same time, I don’t think this resistance comes from laziness. These are often people who work hard. They toil. Frustrated, they lament the passage of time. They just don’t have much to show for it.

What makes this more confusing is that these same people accept process everywhere else. They accept the engineering process: write a spec, code it, review it, test it, ship it. They accept the sales process: prospecting, qualification, proving, contracting. No one argues that those domains are too complex or too contextual to have structure.

I think part of it is fear. What if I follow a process and I still don’t make something good? What if the process exposes that there isn’t magic, and therefore there’s nowhere to hide?

Why is product different?

I suspect it’s because if they truly accepted a product process, they might discover where the “magic” actually lives—and they’d have to take responsibility for it. Because what often happens when you do product work well is that you come out the other side with something that feels obvious.

And when something feels that clear, it’s tempting to say, If it was that obvious, why did we need all that work?

That’s the same mistake as watching someone lift a weight and put it back down and concluding that’s all there is to it. It ignores form, progression, muscle coordination, recovery, nutrition—everything that actually made the lift possible.

It’s reductive. And it’s also full of survivorship bias. We see the inevitable things that survived, but not the obvious things that didn’t. We don’t see the alternatives that were explored and discarded. We don’t see the decisions that connected customer needs to business value step by step.

And none of this is a guarantee. Following a product process doesn’t mean things will work out. It’s not a magic spell. It’s a way of making decisions coherently, over time, in the face of uncertainty.

Recommendations

First, reflect honestly on where your fear lies. What are you actually afraid will happen if you try to be more explicit about how you decide what to build?

Second, research a basic product process. Any reasonable one. And try it.

If you refuse to try one at all—if you’re deeply resistant to learning from any external authority—that’s not a product management problem. That’s your problem to work out. It’s like someone who’s never lifted weights refusing to book a single session with a personal trainer, or refusing to look up proper deadlift form, and then insisting the whole discipline is nonsense.

At some point, you have to ask: what is your problem, really? Product management isn’t magic. And the sooner you stop pretending it is, the sooner you can actually do good work.