Staying clear under pressure

Right now, I’m in a lot of interviews while searching for a job, and they often make me reflect on the hardest phases of my career. One question always comes up: What does great product management look like when everything feels unstable?

In my opinion, it is not about clever frameworks or perfect plans. In those moments, it's about the basics. Staying clear. Cutting everything that does not matter. Protecting direction.

I learned this the hard way during a phase of rapid company growth. We were adding tens of thousands of customers per day, entering new markets, and hiring quickly. I onboarded new people in my second week. It was chaos. Priorities changed constantly. The loudest voice could easily shape decisions, and I noticed how easy it was to add noise instead of making progress.

After a while, I started to see patterns in the product people who handled this well. Three traits stood out. I adopted them as principles to follow.

Choose clarity, not consensus

When teams disagree, the instinct is to align. Run another workshop. Create another deck. Find a middle ground. Don’t.

I used to do that too. It often led to compromise, not progress.

What works better is simpler. Go back to the problem. Anchor the discussion in real customer behavior and a small number of meaningful metrics. Lay out the trade-offs clearly. Once the consequences are visible, weak options usually eliminate themselves.

Decisions made this way rarely come back. They stick because they are grounded in reality, not opinion.

Today, I see product direction as something you have to design deliberately. My job is to make the problem and constraints so clear that the right path becomes obvious. Storytelling is not only for selling ideas. It is for testing and eliminating them.

Make sense of messy feedback

Feedback is rarely clean. Customers contradict each other. Data points in different directions. Sales and support highlight different issues.

Earlier in my career, I tended to react to the loudest signal or tried to fix everything. Both approaches created churn.

What works better is slowing down. Lay all signals next to each other. Complaints. Metrics. Edge cases. Look for the structure underneath. Ideally, do this visually.

At one point, we were looking at three separate complaints that seemed unrelated. When viewed together on the same canvas, they pointed to the same issue: users did not trust what the product was doing. Instead of shipping three small fixes, we addressed the underlying trust gap. That single move solved multiple symptoms.

Now, when feedback feels confusing, I pause. I map the signals before acting. Most surface problems share a deeper cause.

Be willing to remove

Adding is easy. Removing is hard.

A feature performs well. The numbers look strong. The team feels proud. The natural move is to keep it.

But in fast-moving environments, it becomes even more important to ask a different question: Does this build toward the system-level goal, or does it distract from it? When building is fast and cheap, we need to revisit existing functionality more often than ever.

I remember a feature that users loved, but it drove engagement away from the core outcome we cared about. We removed it. There was short-term friction and a few complaints, but long-term retention improved.

Now, I evaluate work not just by local performance, but by whether it compounds toward the whole. Is this feature impactful enough for the bigger goal? If not, it may not justify staying.

What I’ve learned

Under pressure, great product management is not loud. It is not about complex processes. It is about clarity, pattern recognition, and restraint.

Clarity over consensus.
Root causes over surface fixes.
System goals over local wins.

These traits are easy to overlook because they are quiet. They do not show up in feature lists or sprint reports. And they definitely do not show up easily in interview stories about past successes.