#3: From Fog to Flow 💡

Hey there, ladies and gentlemen!

Hope life’s not throwing too many Jira tickets your way.

Also, a quick thank you for opening and reading this every week. I’m just trying to keep it as real as possible, and your feedback genuinely keeps me going.

If you think I’m doing even a halfway decent job, feel free to pass it on: Product in Progress

Welcome to the third edition of Product in Progress, and yeah, things are starting to get real now.

Sometimes when you join a new team, the near-term work is already decided for you.
It’s not a bad thing, it helps you avoid being lost in ambiguity during those awkward first few weeks.

But what happens when the work handed to you is nowhere near your comfort zone?

And that was my Week 3.

42 Open tabs. Zero clarity

In my last few roles as a PM, the work I did was almost always user-facing, which involved improving journeys, reducing drop-offs, and boosting conversions.

It was clean work. Metric-driven. You made a tweak, ran an experiment, and watched the needle move.

But this time, it’s different. The work my team has picked is more foundational and technical — it’s about overhauling systems so that when we scale, we don’t break.

There’s no shiny dashboard to check, no metric to target.

The only success metric - do no harm to the current functionality.

And, the expectation from me is to become a subject matter expert, someone stakeholders can count on when things go sideways technically.

But that also means understanding things I’ve never touched before.
Legacy systems. Infra dependencies. Integration logic.
Things that don’t show up in your typical PM interviews.

And when I first sat with it?

I had 42 tabs open — system diagrams, half-written docs, internal wikis, old threads but zero clarity.

Everything felt important, but nothing felt clear.

And yeah, it overwhelmed me.

Zooming out to zoom in

My first instinct was to read everything.
Every artifact. Every document. Every Slack thread.
I spoke to people. I asked questions. I stared at diagrams I didn’t fully understand.

There was no displacement, just distance.
I looked busy. But I wasn’t going anywhere.

The breakthrough came when I realized: I didn’t need more information.
I just needed direction.

So instead of trying to master everything at once, I set a simpler goal — break it all down.

I broke the problem down into smaller, manageable chunks; things I could actually act on, not just read about:

• Understand the current systems

• Understand the new systems

• Understand how each stakeholder uses these systems

• And finally, bring everyone together, distribute responsibilities, and kick off a shared tracker to stay aligned

That’s it. No grand plans to become a subject matter expert overnight.
Just clear, doable steps I could start ticking off.

And as I moved through it, that quiet, familiar anxiety that had been building inside me started dialing down.

It’s still there, but manageable.
That’s a win.

This week’s cliffhanger:

Like I mentioned last week, just because you’re new doesn’t mean you have to wait for someone to push you. If you’ve got the time, find your own quick wins.

That’s exactly what I did this week in parallel. There are usually 3 ways I discover new opportunities as a PM:

1. Data: Looking at patterns, drop-offs, bottlenecks

2. Competitors: Benchmarking flows, journeys, feature gaps

3. Users: Talking directly to people and listening

Each of these has its own strengths and limitations. And there is an order worth following.

I’ll break it down next week, and show you how I prioritize where to look first.

Till next week...

I’m still not on top of it all. But I have a plan. I have people. And I’m finally moving with intention.

Next week, I’ll walk you through my framework for discovering product opportunities, and the one tool that’s made my async conversations way more effective.

Until then, stay curious.

— Nihit

If this resonated or helped, send it to someone else who’s figuring it out too: Product in Progress