Stop Running Your Product Team Like a Custom Shop

If your product team feels constantly pulled in different directions, overwhelmed, and permanently short on time, this post is for you.

I see this pattern again and again in B2B product teams:

• Planning feels rushed, every single time

• Everyone is overloaded, but nothing really feels finished

• Teams are maxed out because they are simply out of hours

• Alignment feels fragile and temporary

And yet, nothing looks broken at first glance.

What’s actually happening is simpler—and more dangerous—than it seems.

You’re running a custom shop.

What I Mean by “Running a Custom Shop”

In a custom shop, every planning cycle starts from scratch.

New roadmap? New setup.
New priorities? New way of deciding.
New stakeholders? New conversations, new formats, new rules.

Everything is manual.
Everything is bespoke.
And everything takes far more time than it should before the real work even starts.

This isn’t flexibility. It’s inefficiency disguised as adaptability.

Successful product teams don’t magically have more time than you.
They don’t work longer hours.

They have better systems.

The Hidden Cost of Not Having a System

When you don’t have a clear product operations system, a few predictable problems show up.

1. You Depend on Exceptional Individuals

Without systems, you rely heavily on people who are:

• Strong at product discovery and delivery

• Great communicators across sales, marketing, and leadership

• Comfortable making judgment calls under pressure

These people exist—but they are rare.

And even when you have them, the lack of structure doesn’t support them. It exhausts them.

Great people shouldn’t be compensating for missing systems.

2. Every Team Works Differently

No clear processes means:

• Different teams prioritize differently

• Different product managers communicate differently

• Sales and marketing get inconsistent inputs

Some teams explain the why behind decisions.
Others just throw a list of features over the wall.

The result?

Misaligned expectations, frustration, and erosion of trust across teams.

3. Alignment Becomes a Coin Toss

When there’s no shared way to evaluate opportunities:

• Strategy means something different to every team

• KPIs are interpreted inconsistently

• Prioritization becomes opinion-driven

There is no perfect system that guarantees success.

But a good system helps you consistently answer one key question:

Which opportunities are most likely to move us in the right strategic direction?

Without that, alignment becomes accidental.

4. Panic Decisions Take Over

In custom shops, prioritization often defaults to:

• The loudest stakeholder

• The latest customer request

• The executive question of the week

This is how product managers slowly turn into backlog managers.

Not because they lack skill, but because the system forces reactive behavior.

And panic-driven decisions rarely lead to predictable outcomes.

5. Friction, Politics, and Frustration Escalate

When teams don’t understand why decisions are made:

• Frustration builds

• Internal politics increase

• Trust erodes

People don’t need certainty about outcomes.

They need clarity about reasoning.

Systems make decisions understandable, even when they’re unpopular.

Systems Don’t Kill Innovation, They Enable It

“Custom shop” sounds innovative.

And in small contexts, it can be.

But as organizations grow, running everything as a one-off hurts far more than it helps.

Strong product operations systems:

• Reduce chaos

• Eliminate panic decisions

• Create shared understanding

• Allow teams to focus

The goal isn’t rigidity.

The goal is this:

Build once. Reuse. Iterate. Improve.

One setup.
Different needs.
Done.

That’s how product teams scale without burning out.

Want a Starting Point?

I’ve implemented the same product operations foundations across multiple companies to help teams move away from chaos and toward predictable execution.

If you want to see how this looks in practice, you can download my Product Operations Framework for free.

It’s a practical starting point to:

• Stop running your team like a custom shop

• Create alignment across teams

• Make better, more predictable decisions

Download the Product Operations Framework – Free

Less panic.
More clarity.
Better systems.