You need to get every part of the Product Management process right

As a Product Manager, you can't be relaxed about any part of the development process.
Any neglect turns the output feature to shit.

And what’s worse? It’s often not one big mistake. It’s a slow chain of small ones that quietly compound until your release dies at launch.

So, how to prevent this?
Let’s go through the full journey, from idea to post-release, and look at ten critical PM mistakes and their fixes.

I. The Beginning: Defining the Right Problem

1. Solving the wrong problem
You started with a vague “we need to improve engagement” goal, but nobody defined what “engagement” actually means. The team builds something cool, but irrelevant.
Fix: Every idea starts with a sharp, user-observable pain. If you can’t state it in one sentence and measure its change, it’s not ready for development.

2. Skipping validation
You heard the idea from a stakeholder and just ran with it. No user input, no real-world check. What could go wrong? Everything.
Fix: Run the smallest possible test to see if the problem exists. Two customer calls beat ten hours of Miro brainstorming.

3. Misreading data
Data can lie, or rather, we make it lie to confirm our biases. PMs love vanity metrics like “sessions” or “clicks,” while ignoring drop-offs and retention.
Fix: Ask yourself: what metric would prove this idea is useless? If you can’t answer that, you’re probably cherry-picking.

II. Discovery and Definition

4. Ignoring the actual user problem
When “solutions” dominate discussions, users disappear from the picture. You end up optimizing funnels while ignoring what people truly struggle with.
Fix: Keep the user’s words visible. Post their quotes, feedback, or complaints on the wall. Let their voice interrupt your planning meetings.

5. Skipping or overusing discovery
Two extremes: skipping discovery and building blind, or spending months in endless discovery with zero output. Both kill momentum.
Fix: Time-box discovery. Two weeks to gather insights, synthesize, and decide. If you can’t find clarity by then, the problem is probably not worth solving now.

III. Building the Thing

6. Choosing a bad MVP implementation
MVPs should validate learning, not just ship faster. Too often, PMs strip away the value instead of the complexity, releasing something so bare it teaches nothing.
Fix: Build the smallest version that delivers the core experience. If it doesn’t test your core assumption, it’s not an MVP; it’s just incomplete.

7. Rushing the deadline instead of quality
“We’ll fix it later” rarely happens. Once it’s live, the team moves on. You’ve now baked mediocrity into your product.
Fix: Protect the release scope, not the date. A feature that’s late and excellent will recover. A feature that’s on time and broken will haunt you.

8. Releasing with broken tracking
You can’t learn from what you can’t measure. Yet analytics is often an afterthought. The result? You release blind.
Fix: “No tracking = no release.” Instrumentation is not a nice-to-have. It’s part of the acceptance criteria. QA your events as much as your UI.

IV. After Launch

9. Ignoring post-release analysis
PMs vanish after launch, moving to the next shiny initiative. But that’s when the real learning starts.
Fix: Treat every release as an experiment. Review your success metrics, retention, and qualitative feedback after 7, 30, and 90 days. Document the learnings, not just the numbers.

10. Failing to do any follow-up updates
You made a good start, but then left it to rot. Users lose trust fast when feedback never leads to improvements.
Fix: Close the loop. Ship at least one meaningful follow-up iteration based on real usage. It signals responsiveness and keeps your product alive.

There you have it. Ten points where good intentions quietly turn into bad products.

This is a widely extended version of a post I released on LinkedIn.

Did you enjoy this version more? Let me know if you can :)