Product managers are drowning in a sea of tools

A product manager wakes up to 47 Slack messages, three Jira tickets assigned, an Figma update from design, a PRD that's grown to 80 pages, and someone on Teams asking whether they've seen the new roadmap. They open their laptop and open their laptop again, because the tools multiply faster than the work.

This is the quiet crisis of modern product management. The job has been splintered across a dozen platforms—Notion docs, Linear boards, Amplitude charts, productboard requirements, a dozen wikis—each one claiming to be the source of truth. Nobody knows which one is correct. So they build the same thing three ways and call it iteration.

The real work—talking to users, writing clear specs, shipping features that actually matter—gets pushed to the margins by the machinery of coordination. The product manager becomes a full-time liaison between teams, a human router for information.

One writer puts it plainly: the craft of product is getting buried under the tools meant to serve it. The fix isn't more tools. It's cutting the noise and writing a clear spec that anyone can read.

Why this matters for us: la gente who run side businesses already know how to keep things simple—one Google Doc, one spreadsheet, one shared drive. We don't need another tool to tell us what we're doing. We need the tools to shut up.