A diplomatic recipe for justifying your worth in stubborn organisations
Stop Being Treated Like Expensive Garnish: Prove Your PM Value
“We’re not sure we need a Product Manager. Can’t engineering just handle the roadmap?”
Sound familiar? You’re sitting in yet another meeting where stakeholders question your very existence whilst simultaneously complaining about missed deadlines, confused priorities, and features that nobody asked for. They want you to justify your salary like you’re some luxury add-on rather than the strategic brain that keeps their operation running smoothly.
If you’re working in retail, restaurants, or any traditionally operational sector, this conversation happens more often than a burnt batch of scones. Legacy organisations love their hierarchies, trust their gut instincts, and often view Product Management as newfangled overhead rather than essential infrastructure.
The Real Problem: You’re Being Treated Like Expensive Icing
Here’s what’s really happening: you’re being treated like decorative icing on a cake that everyone thinks is already perfect. Meanwhile, you can see the structural cracks, the stale ingredients, and the complete lack of recipe consistency that’s causing customer complaints and operational chaos.
Your stakeholders don’t understand that you’re not the garnish…you’re the master baker who ensures every ingredient works together. Without you, they’re running a kitchen where everyone’s following different recipes, using expired stock, and wondering why customer satisfaction keeps dropping.
The frustration runs deeper when you realise they’re asking you to justify preventing problems they can’t even see coming. How do you quantify the value of disasters that didn’t happen? How do you prove ROI on strategy when they’re only measuring yesterday’s sales figures?
Meanwhile, engineering teams believe they can handle the “what” and “why” themselves, executives treat you like expensive overhead, and you’re constantly defending decisions that should be obvious. It’s exhausting, demoralising, and frankly, a complete waste of your strategic expertise.
A Diplomatic Recipe for Proving Your Worth
Stop defending your role and start solving their problems instead. Here’s your step-by-step recipe for turning skeptics into advocates:
Step 1: Reframe the Conversation From Cost to Risk
Never lead with what you do – lead with what breaks without you. Instead of saying “I manage the product roadmap,” try “I prevent the £50k mistake you made last quarter when three departments built competing solutions.”
Identify their biggest operational pain points:
- Failed project launches that wasted budget
- Customer complaints about confusing experiences
- Departments working at cross-purposes
- Missed revenue opportunities due to poor prioritisation
Then position yourself as the solution to these specific problems, not as a general “strategic resource.”
Step 2: Quantify Their Opportunity Costs
Legacy organisations understand profit and loss better than abstract strategy. Speak their language:
“Without dedicated product leadership, you’re running three separate initiatives that could be one integrated solution. That’s £120k in duplicate effort annually, plus the 6-month delay to market that’s costing us first-mover advantage.”
Calculate the tangible costs of:
- Reworking poorly scoped features
- Lost customers due to confusing experiences
- Delayed launches missing seasonal opportunities
- Inefficient resource allocation across teams
Step 3: Master the Art of Diplomatic Delivery
This is where most PMs trip up. You can’t waltz into a legacy organisation and hand out report cards like a stern headteacher. These environments are built on relationships and saving face.
Instead of: “Your current process is broken and inefficient.”
Try: “I’ve spotted some brilliant opportunities to build on what you’ve already achieved.”
Instead of: “This feature will fail without proper user research.”
Try: “Let me help ensure this excellent concept reaches its full potential with some quick validation work.”
Remember: you can win, or you can be right. Choose winning.
Step 4: Create Quick, Visible Wins
Prove your value through small, measurable improvements before tackling big strategic changes:
- Streamline one painful cross-department handoff
- Prevent one scope creep disaster through clear requirements
- Identify one quick revenue opportunity that’s been overlooked
- Solve one persistent customer complaint through better prioritisation
Document everything. Legacy organisations respect concrete results over strategic vision.
Step 5: Build Your Internal Champion Network
Find the stakeholders who are already frustrated with the current chaos and help them solve their specific problems. When they start singing your praises in leadership meetings, you’ve won half the battle.
Focus on middle management – they feel the operational pain most acutely and often have the ear of senior leadership.
The Long Game: From Skeptic to Advocate
This recipe isn’t about proving you’re right…it’s about making everyone else successful whilst quietly demonstrating why that success depends on proper product leadership. Once stakeholders see concrete improvements in their daily operations, the conversation shifts from “Do we need a PM?” to “How do we keep our PM happy?”
Remember, you’re not just justifying a role – you’re pioneering a mindset shift in an organisation that’s probably been doing things the same way for decades. That takes patience, diplomacy, and a thick skin. But once you’ve proven your worth through results rather than rhetoric, you’ll have the executive sponsorship and respect needed to drive real strategic change.
The key is starting where they are, not where you wish they were. Meet them in their world of profit and loss, operational efficiency, and concrete problems. Then gradually introduce them to yours.
Leave a Reply