Sep 14, 2026 · 6 min read
Where product managers’ time actually goes
Product managers are hired to decide what to build and why. The research on how they spend their week tells a different story, and points to what can change.
The job description versus the calendar
Ask a product leader what a PM is for, and you will hear some version of the same answer: understand customers, set direction, make good calls about what to build next. Look at a PM’s calendar, and you will see something else. Standups, syncs, review meetings, Slack threads, status updates, roadmap decks for three different audiences, and a long tail of “quick questions.”
That gap is not just a feeling. Several published surveys, from both product-specific research and broader studies of knowledge work, point in the same direction. This post walks through what the data actually says, separates the work that matters from the work that only surrounds it, and ends with practical changes for PMs and product leaders.
A note on method: we only cite numbers we could trace to the original publisher, and we name each source as we go. Different surveys measure different things, so we do not combine them into a single figure.
What product-specific research shows
The most recent large look at product teams is Atlassian’s State of Product 2026 report, based on a survey of product managers, engineers, designers, and program managers in the U.S., Germany, and France.
The headline finding on time is blunt. Roughly half (49%) of surveyed product teams said they don’t have enough time for strategic planning and roadmap development. The same share said they can’t fit in data analysis and metrics tracking.
Those are not side tasks. Strategy, roadmap thinking, and reading the data are close to the center of the role. The same report found that nearly 40% of respondents listed prioritizing features among their most significant challenges (respondents could choose more than one), and 49% cited competing incentives or internal politics as a barrier to collaboration.
An older data point suggests this is not new. In Pragmatic Institute’s 2019 Annual Product Management and Product Marketing Survey of 2,474 product professionals, respondents reported a split of 27% strategic work and 73% tactical work. They said they believed they should be spending 53% of their time on strategic activities, roughly double what they reported.
One practitioner quoted in that report, Laurie McBrierty, put the dynamic simply: “If you don’t set aside the time, the tactical will always win out.”
What broader knowledge-work research adds
Product-specific surveys tell us PMs feel short on strategic time. Broader research on knowledge work helps explain where the time goes instead.
• Communication crowds out creation. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index found that, across Microsoft 365 apps, the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating (in meetings, email, and chat) and 43% creating (in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). That figure comes from product usage data, not self-report. In the survey portion of the same study (31,000 workers in 31 countries), 68% said they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday.
• Interruptions are constant for the most-pinged workers. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index reported that employees are interrupted every two minutes during core work hours by meetings, emails, or chats. That figure is based on the top 20% of users by ping volume, which is a fair description of many PMs, who sit at the intersection of engineering, design, sales, support, and leadership.
• Collaboration load has grown for years. In “Collaborative Overload” (Harvard Business Review, January 2016), Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant wrote that time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities had “ballooned by 50% or more” over two decades.
None of these studies focused on product managers specifically. But the PM role is a coordination hub by design, so it is reasonable to expect PMs to sit at the heavier end of these patterns, not the lighter end.
Sorting the work: valuable, necessary, and overhead
It would be easy to read all this and conclude that meetings and communication are the enemy. That would be wrong. Much of a PM’s leverage comes through other people. The useful question is not “how do I communicate less?” but “which communication actually requires me?”
A practical way to sort a PM’s week is into three buckets.
1. Judgment work. Deciding what problem to solve, making tradeoffs, setting priorities, interpreting customer evidence, and aligning people on a direction. This is the work the role exists for, and it is exactly what the Atlassian respondents said they lacked time for.
2. Necessary collaboration. Customer conversations, design and engineering working sessions, and the stakeholder discussions where a real decision is being made. This work is high value, but only when the right people are in the room and the context is ready.
3. Coordination overhead. Compiling status updates, rewriting the same information for different audiences, hunting through Slack, tickets, docs, and recordings for context, chasing approvals, and turning meeting notes into tickets. This work has to happen, but it rarely requires a PM’s judgment.
The first two buckets are the job. The third is the work around the job, and it is the bucket most likely to expand to fill whatever time is available. It is also the bucket that most directly competes with strategy, because it is urgent, visible, and easy to justify.
What this means for PMs and product leaders
The data suggests the problem is structural, not personal. Telling PMs to “be more strategic” does not work if the system keeps generating tactical demands. Here are changes that address the structure.
1. Protect strategic time on the calendar. The Pragmatic Institute data shows a large gap between the time PMs spend on strategy and the time they believe they should. Block recurring time for roadmap thinking and data review, and treat it like a customer meeting.
2. Make status self-serve. If stakeholders can see progress, blockers, and decisions in one place, fewer meetings and messages exist only to ask “where are we?”
3. Audit recurring meetings quarterly. For each one, ask whether a decision is made there. If not, consider replacing it with a written update.
4. Keep decisions tied to evidence. When a priority call links back to the customer feedback, data, or conversation behind it, fewer debates need to be relitigated. That matters when internal politics is a commonly cited barrier.
5. Reduce the number of places context lives. Every tool a PM has to search is another interruption and another copy of the truth to reconcile.
6. Hand off the mechanical parts. Summarizing notes, drafting first-pass tickets, and assembling updates are good candidates for automation. Keep humans on the parts that need judgment.
7. Measure what product leaders reward. If PMs are recognized for responsiveness and polished updates, that is what they will optimize for. Recognize clear decisions and learning instead.
Where Fijord fits
We’re building Fijord around this third bucket: the work around product management.
Fijord is a product-management platform in early access. It connects tools teams already use, including meeting notetakers and recordings like Granola, Gong, Zoom, and Google Meet, along with Slack, Linear, Jira, Notion, GitHub, and Mixpanel. It turns those scattered inputs into signals that stay traceable to the evidence behind them, drafts briefs and tickets, and gives teams four ways to view the work: Canvas, Kanban, Roadmap, and Impact Matrix. Pulse surfaces blockers and approvals, and Fijord helps close the loop after release.
The goal is simple. Less time managing product work, and more time on the decisions that actually require a product manager.
The takeaway
The research does not say PMs are doing the wrong job. It says the job they were hired for is being squeezed by the work surrounding it. Roughly half of product teams in Atlassian’s survey lack time for strategy and data analysis, and broader studies show communication and interruptions taking a large share of the knowledge-work week.
The fix is not heroic time management. It is designing the week, the team’s habits, and the tooling so that coordination happens with less effort, and judgment gets the time it deserves.