Category: Technology

You’re Stuck—and It’s Because You’re Playing by the Rules

In product management, you’ve been told to follow the rules: stick to the roadmap, build consensus, and hit your OKRs. These practices are promoted as essential for success. But what if I told you they’re actually sabotaging your product’s potential?

As can be easily found in many organizations:

• Roadmaps trap you in outdated plans.
• Consensus dulls bold ideas into uninspired compromises.
• OKRs lock teams into short-term goals, ultimately sacrificing innovation for easy wins.  

These practices are designed to bring structure and alignment, but in many cases, they now work against the very success they were meant to enable.  If your product is stagnating, if you’ve ever felt stuck despite following best practices, it’s time to face an uncomfortable truth: the rules you’ve been following may be holding you back.

The most innovative companies didn’t achieve greatness by sticking to convention. They broke free. Companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Basecamp challenged everything they were told about how to build products. They prioritized adaptability, conflict-driven creativity, and bold experimentation over rigid processes.

If you’re ready to stop playing by outdated rules and start driving real impact, it’s time to rethink your approach.

The Rules Are Blocking Your Progress

These so-called “best practices” promise structure and alignment, but they often trap teams in a cycle of predictability and prevent breakthroughs. Let’s take them apart.

Rule 1: Trust the Roadmap

Roadmaps are your comfort zone. They look like a plan, like a map guiding you to success. But they’re really a trap—a neatly structured illusion designed to keep stakeholders happy while suffocating your team’s ability to adapt.

We “know” roadmaps provide structure, alignment, and predictability. More often, they lock your team into outdated commitments and limit your ability to react to new opportunities. The business environment shifts under your feet while you’re stuck delivering features promised in a different era. They’re supposed to guide your team and stakeholders on what’s coming next. But here’s the problem: roadmaps impose a static view of the world. The moment you lock in a plan, reality starts to diverge from it.

Consider this scenario: six months ago, you promised a slate of features that seemed critical at the time. Since then, market dynamics have shifted, competitors have launched new capabilities, and your customers’ needs have evolved—but your team is still marching toward that old roadmap. Meanwhile, adaptable competitors seize opportunities, pivot on short notice, and release impactful features.

Companies like Airbnb mastered real-time prioritization. Originally starting as a platform for renting out space during conferences, they quickly recognized a larger opportunity in short-term rentals and broadened their focus, adapting their product accordingly. Similarly, Netflix constantly experiments with new ideas and adapts based on user behavior, ensuring they stay ahead by embracing change.

Roadmaps are innovation’s silent killer. They create a false sense of progress while dragging your product toward irrelevance. Rather than fueling innovation, roadmaps suffocate it. To drive meaningful progress, it’s time to pivot your plans from that of a roadmap to a living hypothesis – a flexible mindset that can be adapted or discarded the moment better opportunities arise.

Rule 2: Consensus Is Key

Alignment and consensus are critical to success. Everyone needs to be on the same page and agree, right? Wrong. Chasing consensus kills bold ideas and locks teams into mediocrity. When you prioritize making everyone happy, you water down bold ideas into safe, uninspired compromises.

Successful products are born from friction. The most transformative teams cultivate productive conflict and thrive on discomfort. They don’t aim for harmony; they fight for the best ideas to win. When everyone agrees too quickly, it’s a sign that innovation has been sacrificed for comfort. Basecamp exemplifies this approach by openly encouraging debate and dissent to refine their vision. They believe in strong perspectives that are loosely held, constantly challenging assumptions while staying adaptable.

But how do you foster this creative tension without descending into chaos? The most effective teams foster a culture of structured disagreement – not consensus – where ideas are tested through rigorous debate, but personal attacks and politicking are off-limits. Atlassian has demonstrated this by implementing regular “disagree and commit” sessions, where teams are encouraged to raise objections and offer alternative solutions before making final decisions. Once a path is chosen, everyone commits fully to execution.

Breakthroughs come from questioning every sacred assumption. Teams that dare to go against the grain, like those that reimagined markets with entirely new business models, spark change instead of managing the status quo. Think of the teams that questioned whether established norms—like brick-and-mortar-first business models or one-size-fits-all subscription pricing—were truly serving their customers. Companies like Canva grew by defying industry conventions around complex, professional-focused design software – making powerful design tools accessible to everyday users and businesses.

Innovation thrives when teams feel empowered to say, “What if we’re wrong?” and pursue the answers. Without disagreement, you risk reinforcing outdated assumptions.

If your meetings are full of nodding heads and no pushback, you’re not making progress—you’re just circling the familiar.

Rule 3: Set Your OKRs and Stick to Them

OKRs are marketed as the holy grail of product management—bringing focus, alignment, and measurable success. But here’s the reality: OKRs are often anathema to creativity. Teams are confined to targets and quarterly deadlines that reward incremental progress instead of transformative breakthroughs. Many organizations don’t just use OKRs; they worship them, even while they’re killing innovation.

When a company becomes obsessed with OKRs, risk-taking tends to fade. Teams stop asking big questions like, “What could completely change the game?” and instead focus on the all-too-familiar, “What can we deliver this quarter?” This mindset leads to short-term optimization—reaching for low-hanging fruit instead of daring to climb higher.

A familiar setting: The team that spends every quarter sprinting to check boxes: hit the revenue target, ship the features, close deals. Every meeting becomes a performance review rather than a space for creative problem-solving. Experiments that might fail—but could lead to paradigm shifts—are killed in favor of ‘safe’ bets that give executives something to celebrate on their quarterly reviews. Over time, innovation withers, atrophied by the pursuit of KPIs that drive short-term gains, measure what’s easy rather than what matters, and reinforce the status quo.

Companies that break free from this pattern focus on flexible, impact-driven execution. Valve Corporation takes this philosophy to heart by operating without a traditional corporate hierarchy or rigid KPIs. Employees are empowered to pursue projects based on evolving opportunities, with the freedom to pivot as new insights emerge. This approach fosters groundbreaking creativity, as seen in their innovations like Steam and VR technology, driven by exploration over deadlines.

OKRs should serve the strategy, not dictate it. All too often, teams treat them as rigid mandates rather than dynamic tools for learning and alignment.

Stop Letting Rules Block Your Innovation

Roadmaps, consensus, and rigid OKRs aren’t guiding you—they’re boxing you into predictable, uninspired decisions. If you want to create something extraordinary, you need to stop treating these rules as untouchable. Product leaders who drive impact don’t simply follow or reject frameworks—they build adaptive systems that help them navigate evolving challenges.

The most successful companies don’t rigidly adhere to “best practices.”  They focus on solving real problems and drive impact. They rewrite the rules, encourage productive conflict, and use goals to drive ambition—not stifle it. This adaptability extends to their teams, which excel at rapid sense-making—detecting weak signals in the market, responding to emerging opportunities, and staying ahead of change. Innovation thrives when teams are empowered to adapt, challenge assumptions, and experiment boldly.

Ask yourself: Are you ready to stop playing it safe and start leading your product into uncharted territory? What rules do you need to break to finally unlock innovation?

In the next article, we’ll challenge two more “rules” holding you back: that listening to customers and obsessing over data will always point you in the right direction. Spoiler alert—they won’t. Stay tuned to find out how to take control of your product’s vision and strategy.