Common Problems in Product Management (And How to Solve Them) 

Ever felt like you’re walking a tightrope, trying to balance competing priorities and managing stakeholder expectations? You’re not alone. Even the most seasoned Product Managers (PM) and Product Owners (PO) face common challenges that can derail a project. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most common challenges and provide practical solutions to help you overcome them. 

Poor Communication with Stakeholders 

Finding out halfway through a project that a key stakeholder has very different expectations can delay delivery and waste time and resources. Misaligned expectations are often caused by poor communication.  

Solution: Maintain regular and consistent updates to ensure everyone is aligned on product decisions, timelines and progress and use visual tools like roadmaps to keep stakeholders focused and engaged.

Maintain regular updates to:

• Ensure everyone understands current priorities and business requirements.
• Demonstrate progress effectively.
• Keep everyone’s expectations in check.
• Reduce misunderstandings and prevent scope misalignment.

Scope Creep 

Scope creep is every PM’s worst nightmare. Imagine the team are halfway through a sprint when an “urgent” new feature suddenly takes priority. Everything else is pushed aside and now you’re at risk of missing deadlines. Scope creep doesn’t just delay the current sprint, but it also disrupts future sprints and can derail the entire project. 

Solution: The best defence is to be strategic and informed in your decision making. Not every request requires immediate attention, and you should ask yourself: 

1. Is this feature critical to the project’s success or its end-users?  

1. What happens if we don’t deliver this right now? 

1. How will this impact the current and future sprints? 

1. Can this be broken down into smaller, manageable tasks? 

By asking these questions, you can make informed decisions to discuss with stakeholders, helping you to keep your project on track. 

Lack of Focus on the Customer 

Whilst juggling internal goals and stakeholder demands, it’s easy to lose focus on the customer resulting in delivering a feature that doesn’t address their needs.  

Solution: Maintain a continuous feedback loop with your customers, you can ensure your product addresses their needs. Regularly gathering and analysing their feedback helps you to align features with customer personas, ensuring each product decision is customer driven. Before fully committing to a new feature, test it with an MVP or prototype to confirm it resonates with your users. 

You should also keep customer success metrics like retention or satisfaction scores in mind as you make decisions. This ensures you’re not just building for the sake of it but creating solutions that truly benefit your customers. 

Overloaded Backlogs 

An overflowing backlog can be overwhelming, with too many features competing for attention and development resources, the backlog grows unmanageable, leading to delays, frustration, and poor prioritisation. 

Solution: To avoid this, regularly review new feature requests and decide early on if it’s worth pursuing. Making ‘won’t do’ decisions early on can help keep your backlog to be a more manageable and realistic number. Also, check for duplicates requests to avoid unnecessary bloat. Ensure all new requests link back to existing tickets when applicable to ensure commonly requested features are easily tracked and prioritised. 

If your backlog has already spiralled out of control, you might want to make a blanket decision to reject all feature requests that haven’t been updated in the last 18-24 months. If it hasn’t been touched in that time, it’s likely not a priority. This ensures the team remains focused on delivering what matters most.  

Difficulty Prioritising Features 

Prioritising features can be a real balancing act for Product Managers, especially when different stakeholders have competing priorities. Deciding which features should take precedence is often a complex and challenging task. 

Solution: Use a structured framework like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to rank features based on their importance and feasibility. Align features with business goals and customer needs, delivering the most valuable first. Breaking down larger features into smaller, more manageable tasks also makes it easier to demonstrate progress and avoid bottlenecks. 

Open and transparent communication with stakeholders is key. Regularly updating them on how prioritisation decisions align with overall strategy helps reduce friction and ensures that everyone is on the same page. 

Dependency Management 

Managing dependencies between teams, tasks, or systems can derail even the best plans. Left unmanaged, these dependencies become bottlenecks that threaten your project.

Solution: Identify dependencies early during sprint planning or backlog refinement sessions. Flag and document them, and assign clear ownership ensuring regular and open communication between teams and stakeholders. 

For high-risk dependencies, add buffer time to your schedule. This reduces the likelihood of last-minute surprises. Use dependency tracking tools to maintain visibility and address risks before they escalate. 

Conclusion 

Product management is challenging, but with the right tools and strategies, many of these problems can be effectively mitigated. By addressing communication, scope management, customer focus, backlog organisation, and feature prioritisation, Product Owners and Product Managers can keep their projects on track and deliver meaningful value to both stakeholders and users.