“Best practice” usually means “what worked somewhere else, in a different context, with different constraints.” Adopting it without questioning whether it fits your situation is not discipline. It is borrowed thinking. The practices that work best are the ones earned through your own experimentation and failure, not imported from a blog post or a conference talk.
Data should inform decisions, not make them. There are moments — a new market, a paradigm shift, a deeply held user need that does not show up in click events — where the data will tell you nothing useful. In those moments, the best PMs rely on judgment, conviction, and the courage to be wrong. Blind faith in data is just another way to avoid accountability.
When something goes wrong, the instinct is to fix the symptom and move on. The five whys force you to keep digging until you find the system failure underneath. Most product problems are not caused by the thing that broke. They are caused by the decision three layers back that nobody questioned. Simple tools, used consistently, beat sophisticated frameworks used occasionally.
Product management rewards deep thinking. The job punishes it. The average PM spends their day bouncing between standups, stakeholder updates, Slack threads, design reviews, and sprint planning. None of those activities produce the sustained focus that good product thinking requires. Protect your thinking time or the calendar will eat it.
Vision tells you where you want to go. Strategy tells you how you plan to get there. Most product leaders confuse the two. A compelling vision without a strategy is inspiration without a path. A strategy without a vision is efficiency without direction. You need both, and they are not the same document.