The Tactical Trap: Why Product Teams Skip Discovery and Lose the Plot

I didn’t set out to become a product manager or a product marketing manager. I sort of tripped and fell into it. One day I was sharing product experience with the sales team—because someone had to—and the head of marketing got wind of it. Suddenly, I was invited (actually, drafted) into product management.

Why? Because I was already doing the job the product manager wasn’t doing: training salespeople, explaining the product and its capabilities, and creating the tools they needed to have an intelligent conversation with buyers. Apparently, that qualified me.

So there I was, a brand-new product person armed with enthusiasm, a keyboard, and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to be doing.

Naturally, I defaulted to what everyone around me asked me to do:

“Can you build me a slide deck?”

“Do we have a brochure for this?”

“I need something special for a big meeting.”

And I did it. All of it. I was fast. I was responsive. I was tactical as hell.

I built a sales playbook with tools for every stage of the sales cycle. I carried the weight of sales enablement on my back. And I thought I was doing great work.

Then it finally dawned on me: I was describing features. Features on top of more features. None of it connected to outcomes, business results, or the actual problems we were supposedly solving. I was basically a vending machine—insert request, receive asset.

That’s when I realized something had to change. So I did the one thing I hadn’t been doing: I started talking to customers.

I did discovery calls. I did win/loss interviews. I learned what the product solved—and what it absolutely didn’t. I heard what buyers valued, what frustrated them, and what they were trying to accomplish long before they ever cared about our “innovative feature set.”

And that’s when my work shifted from “tactical support” to “strategic contributor.”

Funny how understanding the market does that.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had stumbled into the first phase of what I’d later formalize in the Quartz Open Framework:  DEFINE precedes the CREATE and PREPARE phases of Quartz.

Quartz defines the process from idea to market, beginning with defining the market and its problems. Discovery should be continuous as we learn more about the market throughout the process.

Turns out I had been living entirely in two areas, CREATE and PREPARE:

• CREATE, where product managers spend their time supporting development, grooming backlogs, clarifying requirements, and running between standups like caffeinated air-traffic controllers.

• PREPARE, where product marketing managers generate campaigns, create enablement tools, and desperately try to keep up with what everyone else is shipping.

But DEFINE—the part where you actually understand the market, the problems, and the business outcomes—was a ghost town. Nobody went there. Nobody had time. Everyone was too busy reacting.

Once I saw this pattern, I started seeing it everywhere.

Product managers are consumed by CREATE.

They’re so embedded in development rituals that they sometimes forget they’re not engineers. They become guardians of the backlog instead of champions of market insights. They are vibe-coding solutions before they deeply understand customers' friction and pain points.

Product marketing managers are swallowed by PREPARE.

Campaigns, launches, sales requests, demos… it never stops. They become storytellers of the product instead of investigators of the buyer.

And the net result is painfully predictable.

If everyone is tactical, no one is strategic.

If no one is strategic, the product becomes a collection of features instead of a solution.

And the company ends up wondering why its “product organization” feels more like a service bureau.

It’s not malicious. It’s not stupidity. It’s the tactical trap. Companies reward responsiveness, not insight. They measure output, not understanding. They praise the team that says yes quickly, not the team that asks better questions.

DEFINE—the hardest and most valuable work—is treated like a luxury activity rather than the foundation of the entire discipline.

And here’s where things get unintentionally funny.

Ask a CEO what expertise sales brings, and they’ll say “buyers.” (True or not, that’s what they’ll say.)

Ask what expertise development brings, and they’ll say “code and features.”

Then ask what product management brings.

Watch the CEO pause. Watch their eyes dart upward as they search for an answer. Watch the uncomfortable shrug.

Because if product managers and product marketing managers aren’t spending time in DEFINE, it’s hard for anyone—including the CEO—to articulate what our expertise actually is.

It should be obvious:

Our expertise is the market.

Our specialty is understanding the problems worth solving.

Our value is clarity.

But when we don’t claim that expertise, nobody assigns it to us.

We become feature librarians. Launch coordinators. Jira janitors. Sales support staff with fancier titles.

So here’s the uncomfortable but necessary question:

And if the honest answer is “no one,” then how exactly do we expect to build anything customers will pay for?

The antidote is simple, but not easy.

Spend more time in DEFINE.

Understand the market better than anyone.

Anchor CREATE in real problems.

Anchor PREPARE in real value.

Everything else is noise.

Are You Ready to Break the Trap?

If your product managers and product marketing managers want to spend more time in DEFINE but don’t know where to start—or don’t have a shared method for getting there—that’s exactly why the Quartz Open Framework exists.

It gives product teams a structure for market understanding, problem definition, validation, and strategic clarity… before they rush back into CREATE and PREPARE.

Teams that learn it often say the same thing:“Now we finally know what the job is.”

Just something to consider if you’re tired of living in the tactical trap.