We’ve all had those weeks. You’re swamped from Monday to Friday, but when you look back, you can’t pinpoint a single high-impact strategic task you accomplished. Instead, your time was consumed by endless Slack threads, “quick syncs,” and tracking down information for other teams. This is the world of “product-adjacent” work.
This isn’t the “glue work” that builds essential cross-functional alignment. This is the reactive, low-leverage work that pulls us away from the core of our role: understanding the customer, defining the vision, and shaping the product strategy. When we get stuck in the adjacent, we risk becoming project managers for the backlog rather than drivers of value. The roadmap languishes, user research gets postponed, and we fail to see the forest for the trees. This not only stunts our product’s growth but our own career development as well.
Reclaiming our focus is one of the biggest challenges we face. It requires a conscious effort to distinguish the truly important from the merely urgent and to empower our teams to operate with more autonomy.
How do you strategically delegate or eliminate “product-adjacent” tasks to protect your time for deep, impactful work?