Put That Down, You Don't Need It (Part Three)
The Practical Tools
We've covered the problem (human Jenga towers) and the solution (strategic subtraction). Now: how to actually make this work in practice.
The Delegation Multiplier
What doesn't get taught in product management boot camps is that your job isn't just to manage products—it's to develop product managers. Every time you take on work that someone else could do (possibly better), you're robbing them of a growth opportunity and yourself of the chance to focus on work that actually requires your experience.
Tom, a junior PM, used to sit in meetings looking like he was taking notes but was actually playing Wordle. Not because he was lazy, but because he never got to own anything meaningful. Everything interesting got escalated to someone else. So he spent his days updating Jira tickets and attending status meetings—important work, sure, but not the kind that builds judgment or strategic thinking.
When we started delegating real responsibility—not just tasks, but decisions—Tom transformed. He began asking better questions in discovery sessions. He started challenging assumptions instead of just documenting them. He learned to say no to stakeholders when they requested features that didn't align with user needs. In six months, he went from note-taker to strategic contributor.
And here's the beautiful irony: by giving Tom more responsibility, we created more space for ourselves to focus on the work that needed our skills and experience—the cross-functional alignment, the strategic planning, the difficult conversations with leadership about trade-offs and timelines.
But delegation isn't just dumping work on someone else's plate. It's creating space for people to grow while creating clarity about who owns what. When everyone knows their lane, when expectations are clear, when success is defined upfront—that's when teams start humming instead of grinding.
Strategic Delay: The Art of Productive Procrastination
This brings us to strategic delay—not the practice of slowing down to speed up, but something more specific and useful. It's a personal strategy for how to prioritize things down the list because they have lower impact, need more discovery, or are likely to evaporate under the glare of daily pressure.
Most requests that feel urgent aren't. They're just loud. And most loud requests, when subjected to even mild scrutiny, reveal themselves to be solutions in search of problems, or problems that solve themselves given enough time.
In one instance, we had three different stakeholders requesting variations of the same reporting feature. Each one was convinced their version was critical, urgent, couldn't wait. Instead of building three different solutions immediately, we delayed all of them for two weeks while we did actual user research.
Two of the requests were trying to solve problems that our existing analytics already addressed—the stakeholders just didn't know how to access the data. The third was valid, but much simpler than originally described. What would have been three sprints of development became one afternoon of training and one day of building a simple export function.
Strategic delay isn't about being slow. It's about being smart. It's recognizing that some problems solve themselves, some requirements clarify themselves, and some urgent requests reveal themselves to be neither urgent nor necessary when given the chance to breathe.
The key is being transparent about the delay. Don't just say "we'll get to it eventually." Explain what you're waiting for: "Let's give this two weeks to see if the pattern holds." "I want to validate this with actual user research before we build it." "This feels like it might be solving a symptom rather than the cause. Let's dig deeper."
The Measurement Imperative
None of this works without measurement, but not the kind of measurement we usually obsess over. Don't measure how busy you are, measure how effective you are. Don't track how many features you ship, track how much value you create.
I use the standard arsenal—Jira, planning sessions, daily standups, one-on-ones—but for my own lists I use Notion. It generates a sort of sanity field for me every time I open it, this protective zone of clarity where I can actually think about what I'm accomplishing versus what I'm just doing. Away from the noise of Teams notifications and sprint velocity charts, I can connect the dots between activity and impact in a way that all the other tools somehow obscure. But that's me. There's a tool out there for you. Guaranteed.
Jennifer took this much further. She built a Google Form backed to a Sheet where she quickly records her work as "Win," "Learn," or "Challenge," each sized as "Big," "Medium," or "Small." Every week, she feeds this data to GPT to chart and summarize her personal velocity and trajectory. Then she adjusts accordingly—more nos, more yeses, strategic delays—like minithrusters on a docking capsule, making tiny course corrections to stay aligned with her goals.
The data tells a story, and the story is almost always the same: teams that focus on fewer things deliver more value. Companies that say no strategically grow faster than companies that say yes reflexively. People who measure impact outlast people who measure activity.
The Long Game
The hardest part about strategic subtraction is that it requires playing the long game in a short-game world. Your quarterly reviews might look sparse compared to the person who shipped seventeen features (even if none of them moved the needle). Your velocity metrics might be lower than the team that built everything on the backlog (even if most of it was never used).
But here's what I've learned after many years of watching careers rise and fall in this industry: the people who last, who grow, who eventually run things—they're not the ones who said yes to everything. They're the ones who learned to say no strategically, who built teams instead of just shipping features, who measured impact instead of output.
Put That Down
So here's my take, from someone who's made these mistakes so you don't have to: put that down. Whatever that extra thing is that you're carrying around—the project that doesn't quite fit, the commitment you made when you were feeling optimistic, the task that someone else could do better—put it down.
You don't need it.
What you need is clarity about what matters, the courage to say no to what doesn't, and the patience to measure what you're actually accomplishing instead of just tracking what you're doing.
Your team will thank you. Your stakeholders will respect you. Your leadership will notice you. And the person who eventually takes your job when you get promoted? They'll have a roadmap for how to be effective instead of just busy.