The Bar You Keep Setting
You want your team to be more strategic and take more ownership, and you’ve said so more times than you can count. When nothing changes, it’s tempting to decide they just don’t have it. Some might not, but there’s something to check on your side first.
When managers come to me to help them upskill their product teams, there are usually specific things they are looking for. They want the teams to be more strategic, take more ownership, lead, understand and connect the bigger picture, promote the important things and make a noticeable impact.
They have been trying to bring the team there themselves, but not much has changed.
They have talked about their expectations with the team so many times that at some point it starts to feel like the team just isn’t taking it on. Some managers end up doing the important work themselves. More often, they stay quietly disappointed and hand it to someone else.
But as a manager, you own the team’s growth, and not just as a statement but with your everyday actions.
Before you declare the team is incapable (and some people might indeed have to go), check if what you are doing helps the team succeed. As with children, what you do when you are disappointed sends a much stronger signal than what you say you want.
The things you don’t say
Think about the last review where something didn’t quite hold. A plan that wasn’t crisp enough strategically. An argument with a hole in its logic. There were ten more things on the agenda, the person had worked hard on it, and stopping to dig in felt awkward. So you moved on.
That’s understandable. But you make a statement even when you say nothing. Moving on with a plan that wasn’t crisp enough, or accepting a logic that doesn’t make sense, tells the team that it doesn’t matter. That we are good with this level of thinking. You don’t have to praise it to send the wrong signal. Ignoring it and letting it pass does the same thing, and not only to the person presenting. Everyone in the room hears it and learns.
People rarely read the bar from what was announced. They read it from what happened the last time, and they adjust to it, usually without noticing.
So your team’s real bar isn’t set in a workshop or a document. It’s set in every conversation, by what you actually accept.
Don’t let them off the hook
When you are not getting what you expect from people, it is very natural to work around it. Either because you don’t like confrontations, or because you feel it would be nitpicky to insist on strategy when everyone wants to get to the point. But working around it sends exactly the signal we want to avoid. To send the right one, you need to speak up and not let them off the hook.
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If they don’t have an opinion, ask them what they think. If they lay out the options and stop there, ask for a recommendation. When something they say doesn’t make sense, say that you don’t understand. If they suggest something but can’t explain the rationale behind it, ask why they think it’s the right thing to do. If their KPI analysis doesn’t lead to the conclusion they are making, challenge their logic.
In each of these examples you refuse to own the gap for them and force them to confront it straight up. Say what you see and what’s bothering you. It’s much easier to deal with concrete questions (even if they are hard to answer) than with a vague sense that their boss is not satisfied but they don’t understand what you really want.
They don’t always know how to do it
Sometimes sending it back to them isn’t enough because they understand that something is off but don’t know what right looks like. Remember that in many cases it’s new territory for them as well. That’s when you need to coach them and not just give them the end goal to aspire to.
A very talented product manager that I hired a long time ago showed me her roadmap deck for the first time. For her, it included everything a roadmap should include (the plan for the year), but I didn’t get it. My problem was that it didn’t explain why we were building it that way. I told her I didn’t understand what she was trying to tell me.
She was already an experienced PM, and as far as she was concerned, it was an excellent deck. She had no idea what I wanted from her.
So I sat with her and we took one slide as an example. I read it and told her which questions were still left in my head. Maybe she had already thought about them and it was all clear to her, but it wasn’t reaching me. Maybe she hadn’t, and needed to.
She went and worked on it. The beginning was already better. The rest wasn’t there yet.
I think we went through about five rounds like that, until it became a story that made sense. I had to hold her hand through it, but the next time she had to build one, she didn’t need me at all.
As a manager, your job is to help your people succeed, not just watch them failing and regret you hired them. More often than not, that guidance makes all the difference.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on October 14, 2026.
Originally published at https://infinify.com on October 29, 2026.
