Home / The Product Journey / Section 07: What Most PM's Get Wrong

PM Pitfalls

These are the mistakes you will encounter in your first three months. Knowing them in advance changes how you navigate them.

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Skipping Discovery because leadership decided

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The CEO's conviction is a hypothesis, not validated research. Treating an executive idea as a proven problem means building without evidence is the most expensive kind of wrong.

Fix: Run a two-week Discovery sprint before any PRD is written. Frame it as de-risking the investment, not challenging the idea.

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Confusing PLC with PDC

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PLC stages (Introduction → Decline) get applied to individual features as if they were PDC stages (Discovery → Post-Launch). This produces strategy decisions applied at the wrong level.

Fix: Keep the frameworks in separate conversations. PDC = how you build. PLC = where you sit commercially. Never use them interchangeably.

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Scaling before Product-Market Fit

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Acquisition spend increases, features are added, the team grows but the retention curve is still declining. The problem is not execution. The product has not found PMF yet.

Fix: Run the Superhuman PMF survey before any significant scaling investment. Below 40% "very disappointed" means you have not found it.

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Treating the PDC as a linear pipeline

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Teams move from Post-Launch directly back to Development without re-entering Discovery. New learnings get added as tickets rather than triggering proper problem re-framing.

Fix: After every Post-Launch Review, hold a one-hour Discovery session: "What did we learn, and what new problem does that reveal?"

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Defining success metrics after launch

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The team ships, then asks "how will we know if it worked?" By then, the baseline is unknown, the measurement period is unclear, and early data is biased.

Fix: Write the success metric in the PRD. Define it before Definition is signed off. It must exist before a single sprint is planned.

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Treating Post-Launch as the end

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The team celebrates launch, moves to the next initiative, and Post-Launch data sits in a dashboard nobody reads. The most valuable signal arrives 4–8 weeks post-launch.

Fix: Schedule the Post-Launch Review before you ship. Put it in the calendar before the launch date. Make it the first agenda item of the next planning cycle.