Things I intentionally stopped doing
Growth in product isn't always about doing more.
At a certain point, progress comes from stopping the right things.
One of the first things I intentionally stopped doing was solving every problem myself.
Early on, being the person with answers felt productive. It felt like leadership. Over time, it became a bottleneck. Teams waited for my input. Problems queued behind me.
Letting others own problems, even when they'd approach them differently, created more leverage than direct involvement ever did.
I also stopped optimising for constant alignment.
Not every decision needs consensus. I learned to be clearer about ownership and trust teams to execute within agreed boundaries.
If someone owns a problem and the constraints are clear, they don't need my sign-off. That reduced meetings without increasing risk.
Another shift was stepping back from over-explaining.
I used to write long context documents for every decision. Detailed rationale. Every edge case covered.
I realised that when principles are clear, explanations can be shorter. Over-communication often signals missing clarity elsewhere. If I needed three pages to explain something, the strategy probably wasn't sharp enough.
I also stopped treating speed as an unquestioned good.
Some decisions benefit from slowing down, especially when they create long-term constraints. API contracts. Data models. Platform boundaries.
Learning when not to rush was an important change. Moving fast on the wrong decision just means you arrive at the wrong place sooner.
Finally, I stopped equating visibility with impact.
Some of the most valuable work happens quietly. Removing friction. Clarifying decisions. Preventing problems that never surface.
Nobody celebrates the outage that didn't happen. But that work compounds.
None of these changes happened all at once.
They were deliberate choices, made as the system around me changed.
Stopping the right things created space for better ones to emerge.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is get out of the way.