u/Exciting-Cat1996

So I've been thinking about this: what is the one thing that, if it were completely under my control, I would perform 10x better as a product manager?

Sometimes I go between having all the stakeholders under my influence and they would listen to me. That is the first thing that came to my mind but then I really thought about it and saw that, okay, if I could actually visualise and understand people's pain points, I feel that would be a much bigger power.

The third would be just the creativity to solve things. I think I am kind of confused between two but I think actually understanding people's pain points with the product at a minute detail level and at a big level will definitely be something that I would choose. I am still kind of confused, like maybe I already have that or maybe I don't have that already, or is it the influence that I'm lacking? Let me know what you guys think.

So basically the issue I'm facing nowadays is the time it takes for me to do RCA, brainstorm, and validate with customer interviews any new feature or any previous bug or any issues or fiction in the product. My team can make 10 features in the same time frame.

What are you guys doing to speed up this process of brainstorming, validating with users, doing user interviews, or probably getting the right behaviour understanding about the customer as soon as possible? Because it takes time for behaviour patterns to emerge, when launching a new feature, how do you quickly validate that it is working fine or is there an issue? That has been a problem. I am saying that there are no planned features; they are less planned features and more and more vibe coding, coded features driven by engineers now. They are getting time to do what they wanted to do and what they wanted to implement as compared to real features coming down from customer ask.

I’m a self-taught PM/founder and never formally worked under a senior PM. Most of my product thinking came from building products and figuring things out along the way (scaled one product to ~100k WAU).

One heuristic I keep coming back to is:

“If this metric moves, what decision changes?”

If the answer is just “we’d look into it,” I usually don’t think it deserves dashboard space yet. It may still be useful for debugging or exploratory analysis, but not as a core metric.

Curious how others think about this: How do you decide which metrics become L1/L2 or get monitored daily/weekly?