Expand Your Vision: How Great PMs Rise Above the Day-to-Day
One of the biggest traps I see product managers fall into is getting buried in the day-to-day. JIRA tickets, bug triage, sprint reviews, stakeholder requests—the work never ends. And it’s important work. But if you spend all your time in the weeds, you risk losing sight of the bigger picture.
I’ve been there myself. Early in my career, I believed being detail-oriented was the mark of a great PM. I prided myself on knowing every feature spec, every dependency, every workaround. But I later realized: that wasn’t what my executives were looking for.
What they wanted was someone who could connect the dots, anticipate where the market was headed, and shape a strategy that would carry the business forward.
Why It Matters for Product Leaders
Studies of leadership effectiveness consistently show that strategic perspective is one of the most sought-after traits in rising leaders. And yet, Gallup research found that only 22% of managers strongly agree their leaders have a clear direction for the future.
For PMs, this gap is even more pronounced. Your job isn’t just to deliver features—it’s to translate customer needs, market signals, and business priorities into a coherent vision. That requires looking up and out, not just down and in.
The Trap: Heads Down, Eyes Closed
PMs often get caught in a loop:
Too busy answering Slack pings to step back.
Too focused on execution metrics to think about outcomes.
Too worried about short-term trade-offs to ask long-term questions.
But here’s the truth: staying buried in details is a career limiter. The higher you rise, the more people depend on you to see what’s coming next.
A Turning Point in My Career
My perspective shifted when I realized that executives weren’t evaluating me on whether I had every task under control. They were listening for whether I could connect customer insights to business outcomes, and market changes to strategy.
That’s when I began building the muscle of zooming out—asking not just “what are we shipping this sprint?” but “why does it matter, and where is it taking us?”
Three Practices to Expand Your Vision
Stay close to your customers. Strategic insight starts with empathy. Keep your ear to the ground through interviews, support tickets, and usage data.
Understand your executives’ priorities. What keeps your CEO or CRO up at night? Connect your product story to their language.
Make space for thinking. Block time on your calendar not for doing, but for reflecting—on trends, opportunities, and risks you see on the horizon.
Example from coaching: A PM I worked with was struggling to get buy-in for their roadmap. They were presenting features, not vision. Once they reframed the conversation around market trends and customer outcomes, the entire tone shifted. Executives stopped questioning backlog items and started asking, “How can we help accelerate this?”
A Final Word
As a PM, it’s easy to measure your impact by the backlog you clear. But true product leadership isn’t about clearing tasks—it’s about expanding perspectives.
When you rise above the day-to-day and start seeing the forest, not just the trees, you step into the role executives and customers need you to play: the one who can see around corners, chart the path forward, and inspire others to follow.
That’s the difference between managing products and leading them.