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The most effective product leaders don’t control every decision, they create the conditions for great decisions to happen without them.
After transitioning from consulting to strategy and finally to product management at Statsig, I’ve had to learn that my value as a PM isn’t proven through my own actions - it’s through the collective impact of my team.
The challenge of proving value
When I joined Statsig as PM for our SDKs team, I faced a daunting reality: much of my engineering team had been there since day one, with deep technical knowledge and strong opinions about our product. As someone coming from a less technical background, the anxiety was immediate:
"How do I add value to a team that knows the product better?"
"How do I build trust and credibility?"
My first instinct was to fall back on what had worked in consulting: prove your worth through sheer effort and mass-accumulating knowledge. I approached product management the same way. I spent late nights reading everything I could about our SDKs, diving deep into technical docs, absorbing as much knowledge as possible to demonstrate my value.
The issue was that I was trying to out-knowledge engineers who had years of context, while I neglected the strategic work that mattered. Continuing down this path would have led to burnout.
This fear isn't unique to me. I've seen it repeatedly in conversations with other PMs, including many of our customers.
The natural response to this anxiety is to try to prove your worth through control.
The two paths for product leaders
When facing this credibility gap, product managers typically choose between two paths:
The brute force PM
This PM attempts to learn every microscopic detail about their product area. They control the backlog with an iron grip. They can answer any question about any feature instantly. They see every pull request. They are consulted on every decision, no matter how small.
This approach feels like the safe choice. If you know everything, no one can question your value. When the CEO asks, you have every answer.
But there's a critical flaw: it doesn't scale.
The more senior you become, the more unsustainable the brute force approach is. When you try to do everything at 100%, you lose agency over what trade-offs you’re willing to make. Paradoxically, trying to control everything actually reduces your control over what matters most.
Even worse, micromanagement doesn't just hurt you; it diminishes your engineers. When smart, capable people are reduced to executing tasks without context or decision authority, their investment in both the product and your leadership erodes. You've secured perception of your value at the expense of performance and trust.
The force-multiplier leader
The alternative is transformative: instead of gatekeeping decisions, establish clear guardrails, objectives and then step back.
As a force-multiplier PM, you amplify the impact of the team by:
Defining outcomes that matter rather than dictating every task
Providing context about user needs and business priorities
Creating frameworks that enable autonomous decision-making
Trusting your engineers to determine the "how" once they understand the "why"
At Statsig, I experienced the power of this approach during a customer project. Our engineering manager was on paternity leave, and a major customer needed a complex feature implemented urgently.
Instead of dictating the solution, I focused on communicating the customer's needs, the business impact, and guidelines for a scalable solution. I trusted my engineers to determine the implementation details. In the end, the feature was completed in two weeks with minimal supervision. I executed an urgent break-in request and gained further trust with my team.
The irreplaceable PM in the age of AI
This force-multiplier approach becomes even more crucial as we face broader industry questions about PM relevance in an AI-accelerated world.
As AI improves, the knowledge-hoarding PM has an expiration date. LLMs can already store and retrieve more discrete information than any human. If your value is primarily in knowing everything, LLMs will outperform you. The irreplaceable skills are the most “human” ones.
What machines struggle with is precisely what the force-multiplier PM excels at:
Building relationships and trust - When a PM asks an engineer to prioritize a task, the response isn't based on the PM's knowledge alone. Engineers trust a PM's direction because of relationship equity. They know the PM trusts them too. An AI may contain more raw information, but lacks the relationship that drives human teams.
Grasping intangible user needs - AIs interpret requests literally, and are grossly sample inefficient. PMs grasp broader context. When users complain about "setup difficulty," a PM steeped in historical customer context can anticipate the workflows, tools, and human tendencies that result in that perception. They synthesize social cues and unstated user feelings that don't appear in data. PMs understand not just what users say, but what they actually need.
Agency and conviction - Conviction to say “no” drives innovation. Early at Statsig, our CEO initially rejected warehouse native functionality as "not the future." One persistent engineer disagreed repeatedly, eventually building it independently. Today, it's one of our most successful capabilities. Not only can AI not act on its own - its trained to never disagree.
The future of product management isn't about knowing everything. It's about leveraging your most human attributes to enable your team to contribute their best work towards your shared goals.
Moving beyond control
The most counterintuitive truth in product leadership is that your value scales not through control but through empowerment. The more correct decisions made without your involvement, the greater your impact.
If you're currently trapped in the brute force model, making the shift isn't easy. It requires vulnerability to admit you don't know everything and courage to trust others with meaningful decisions.
But the alternative, continuing to hoard decisions while your scope increases, is a path to certain burnout and limited impact.
Our team at Statsig has worked with hundreds of product organizations, learning these lessons through successes and painful failures. What's most rewarding is seeing our customers adopt not just our tools but our philosophy.
We've distilled these experiences into "The Pursuit of Imperfection: A Playbook for Outcome-Obsessed PMs", offering frameworks for implementing force-multiplier leadership in different team contexts.
If these challenges resonate with you, our guide provides practical approaches to transforming how you lead your product team: moving from control to empowerment, from bottleneck to multiplier.
Product manager playbook
