Product management has become one of the most written-about, talked-about, and debated disciplines in the technology industry. There are frameworks for everything: discovery, prioritisation, roadmapping, stakeholder management, and measurement. And yet, despite all this intellectual infrastructure, many product teams are still struggling to build products that customers love.
At PR_D_CT DAY 2023, Koen Boncquet, Group Product Manager at HubSpot, delivered a provocative talk that argued the product management discipline has become its own worst enemy. By obsessing over process, frameworks, and methodology, the field has produced a generation of product managers who are procedurally excellent but substantively timid, great at following the playbook but reluctant to develop and defend strong product opinions.
As a Belgian product leader at one of the world's most recognised SaaS companies, Koen brought both credibility and conviction to his argument. The talk was a call to arms for product managers to rediscover the courage to be opinionated.
Original Presentation Slides
Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.
