PM Twitter vs. PM Reality: What’s True & What’s Trash
“Your backlog is not a roadmap.”
“The best PMs write no tickets.”
“PMs don’t need to know how to code.”
“Shipping is a mindset.”
“PMs are the CEOs of the product.” 🚩
Welcome to PM Twitter: a land of hot takes, spicy threads, unsolicited frameworks, and endless debates over Miro boards and MVPs.
I’ve spent enough time both scrolling Twitter and shipping actual products to tell you — some of it is gold, and some of it is just ✨main character syndrome✨ disguised as wisdom.
Let’s break down what’s true, what’s trash, and what’s just Twitter trying to sound smart.
🧠 1. “PMs are the CEOs of the product.”
🔥 PM Twitter says: You own it all. Be the visionary. Lead the charge.
🤯 PM Reality: You can’t even schedule a retro without begging someone on Slack.
Why it sounds good:
This Steve Jobs-esque comparison makes PMs feel powerful. It suggests autonomy, authority, vision.
The reality?
You don’t control hiring. Or budgets. Or sometimes even the roadmap. You’re more like the Mayor — a figurehead who influences, but has to get buy-in from everyone (Design, Eng, Legal, Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, Your Cat).
📖 Great read: Shreyas Doshi’s take on “PM is CEO”
✅ Verdict: TRASH (but aspirational)
📦 2. “Just ship it!”
🔥 PM Twitter says: MVP > Perfection. Ship fast. Iterate faster.
🤯 PM Reality: 2-week legal review. One-week stakeholder buy-in. Then engineering re-estimates it as “epic-level effort.”
This mindset is useful. It encourages momentum over analysis paralysis. But in practice?
You’re working with legacy APIs, compliance teams, and people who are terrified of bugs in prod. “Just ship it” often turns into “just scope it down to oblivion.”
💡 Bonus Tweet:
“We shipped fast. It broke. We shipped again. It still broke. Now we don’t ship without a Notion doc, a Figma flow, and a soul contract.” — literally every startup ever
✅ Verdict: TRUE (with heavy asterisks)
✍️ 3. “PMs don’t need to write tickets.”
🔥 PM Twitter says: Focus on strategy! Let the team own delivery.
🤯 PM Reality: If you don’t write the ticket, it won’t get done. Or worse, it’ll get done wrong.
I get it. You want to be doing “vision work.” But PMs live in the gray space between the big picture and tiny edge cases. If you’re not writing tickets, you’re probably cleaning up after them later.
Besides, sometimes writing tickets is the strategy — you’re shaping scope, clarifying intent, aligning priorities.
🔗 Related read: Julie Zhuo on what great PMs actually do
✅ Verdict: TRASH for juniors, TRUE for seniors who’ve earned that trust
🧪 4. “PMs should think like scientists, not executives.”
🔥 PM Twitter says: Hypothesis > HiPPO. Test and validate everything.
🤯 PM Reality: You’ll still get told, “We just need this button added for the sales team by Friday.”
This one’s actually solid. Great PMs are always curious. They ask “why?” five times. They run experiments, look for data signals, and fight their gut instinct with customer feedback.
But let’s be real — sometimes strategy gets handed down and you just gotta execute.
📚 Nerd candy: Teresa Torres on Continuous Discovery
✅ Verdict: TRUE (when you’re allowed to think)
🧠 5. “Your backlog is a graveyard.”
🔥 PM Twitter says: Kill the backlog. Live in the now.
🤯 PM Reality: That one Jira ticket from 2022? Still haunting your sprint planning like a ghost with overdue acceptance criteria.
Honestly? This is pretty spot on. Your backlog isn’t a priority list — it’s a guilt pile. The more it grows, the less useful it becomes.
👉 I’ve started treating my backlog like a grocery list: only what I actually plan to use this week makes it in.
✅ Verdict: TRUE (hit archive on that mountain of “someday”)
💬 Final Thoughts: Is PM Twitter Useful?
Honestly… yes.
But only if you know how to separate the performance from the practice.
Here’s what I do:
- Bookmark the good stuff: Threads from folks like Shreyas Doshi, Lenny Rachitsky, John Cutler
- Ignore the dopamine-bait hot takes
- Turn ideas into experiments — try, reflect, adjust.
🎁 Bonus: Top 5 PM Tweets That Actually Changed How I Work
- “Good PMs don’t just listen to users. They listen between the lines.” — @shreyas
- “Product strategy = what you don’t do.” — @lennysan
- “Bad PMs obsess over solutions. Good PMs obsess over problems.” — Unknown legend
- “You don’t need a bigger roadmap. You need smaller bets.” — @johncutlefish
- “Meetings aren’t the problem. Bad meetings are.” — Too real.