It’s a familiar sight. The sprint board’s overflowing, Slack’s buzzing like a wasp in a jar, and your calendar looks like a game of Tetris played by a caffeine-addled intern. You’re moving, constantly. But are you actually making progress?
Product management has a productivity problem — and it’s not because we lack tools, frameworks, or clever acronyms. It’s because we’ve been conditioned to equate busyness with value. We chase the dopamine hit of task completion, the illusion of momentum, the visible artefacts of “doing.” But beneath all that activity, we’re often running on behavioural autopilot.
Behavioural Traps, Not Tool Failures
When teams stall or misfire, the first instinct is to blame the tools — wrong ticket format, broken retro process, bad tooling integration. But zoom out, and a more human pattern emerges.
Take the Planning Fallacy: our chronic tendency to underestimate how long tasks take, even when we’ve done them before. Or the Zeigarnik Effect: the gnawing mental load of unfinished tasks that quietly erodes focus. Or availability bias, where whatever’s most visible — not most valuable — gets done first.
These aren’t Jira bugs. They’re behavioural bugs. And they run deep.
The most dangerous part? They’re often invisible. A team can look productive from the outside — burndown charts trending down, stand-ups filled with updates — while inside, energy is being drained by bias loops and cognitive leakage.
Attention Economics and Distorted Feedback
Every product manager operates within a loop — signal in, decision made, feedback received. But most of us are working in environments where the feedback is slow, noisy, or misaligned. So we improvise. We reach for the urgent instead of the important. We prioritise legibility over learning.
The economics of attention are brutal. Every Slack ping, every roadmap deck, every stakeholder nudge competes for a piece of our finite cognitive budget. And without deliberate boundaries, we reward the wrong behaviours: responsiveness over reflection, visibility over value, busywork over boldness.
Our internal systems adapt to survive this pressure. But like any system under duress, they can warp. Short feedback cycles feel good — tick a task, close a card, reply fast — but they rarely align with strategic outcomes. They just keep the noise moving.
Building a Reset Protocol
So what’s the alternative? It’s not about getting “better tools” or blocking out half a day for Notion therapy. It’s about switching modes — from reactive to reflective.
Every PM needs a reset protocol — a moment in the cycle where you zoom out, reframe, and ask: Am I working from behaviour, or being worked by it?
That might look like a post-sprint check-in, not on delivery but on decision quality. Or a behavioural radar that logs which biases showed up that week. Or even a ritual pause before daily planning: Cue → Pause → Reframe → Choose.
These micro-habits aren’t sexy. They don’t fit neatly on a CV. But they protect your most valuable asset: clarity of thought.
Conclusion
Busyness is a cheap high. It looks good from the outside and feels productive in the moment. But over time, it eats away at your ability to think clearly, prioritise meaningfully, and act with intention.
Great product management isn’t about speed. It’s about signal. And that signal gets clearer when we stop reacting and start reflecting.
So next time your week feels “full,” ask yourself: Am I actually getting anywhere? Or am I just sprinting in circles, powered by perfectly plausible — but totally unexamined — behavioural scripts?
Debug yourself. Then ship.