Sep 6, 2026 · 4 min read
Why we started Fijord
Product managers have become the catch-all of the product team. We started Fijord to give them their time back, so they can spend it making the product better.
The conversations that changed my mind
Fijord started with conversations. Before we wrote a line of code, I spent months talking with product managers about how their weeks actually go.
The same story came up again and again. Calendars packed from morning to evening. A backlog of tickets to groom, updates to write, stakeholders to chase, and decisions to document. A constant feeling of being busy without getting to the work that matters most.
One conversation has stayed with me. A PM told me, “My best ideas happen when I’m away from the computer.” Then she paused and added, “And I’m rarely away from it.”
That’s the whole problem in two sentences.
PMs became the catch-all
Somewhere along the way, the product manager became the team’s catch-all. PMs run the meetings, own the tickets, keep the roadmap current, answer every “quick question,” and hold the context nobody else has written down.
They do a lot of everything, and the system leaves very little room to do any of it well.
They’re also expected to hold an impossible amount of context: every customer call, every metric, every Slack thread, every stakeholder opinion. No one can keep all of that in their head. When the evidence is scattered, human instincts fill the gap. The most recent conversation feels the most important. The loudest voice in the room wins. A genuinely important signal gets missed because it lives in a tool nobody had time to open.
The research points the same way. In Atlassian’s State of Product 2026 survey, 49% of product teams said they don’t have enough time for strategic planning and roadmap development. We dig into more of that data in our post on where product managers’ time actually goes.
I’ve felt the downstream cost of this myself. As a product designer, I’ve been on the receiving end of thin tickets and missing context, and I’ve watched designers and engineers go back to an already overloaded PM for the “why.” The problem was never the people. It was how much we’d piled onto one role.
The work only a PM can do
The most valuable thing a product manager does is think. Weigh the evidence. Trust their intuition. Make the hard calls about what gets built and why.
That work needs space, and the job as it exists today leaves almost none. Housekeeping crowds it out. Every hour spent rewriting status updates or hunting for a customer quote is an hour not spent making the product better.
Our mission: give PMs their time back
Fijord exists to hand that time back. We take on the work around product management so product managers can own their time again, and spend it on the product.
• Take on the housekeeping. Drafting tickets and briefs, gathering context, and keeping status current shouldn’t eat a PM’s week.
• Bring the evidence together. Customer calls, data, and conversations in one product memory, so big decisions rest on the full picture rather than the latest meeting or the loudest voice.
• Keep the why attached. Every ticket stays traceable to the evidence behind it, so the team stops pulling the PM back in for context.
The real goal
Our mission is more personal than a productivity metric. Many of the PMs I’ve spoken with are stretched close to burnout. We want to give them their time back, so they can:
• train for that marathon
• take a full lunch break
• enjoy time with their kids
• feel in control of their life again, proactive instead of reactive
And so they get back the time where the best ideas happen: away from the computer.
Fijord is in early access. If this sounds like your week, we’d love to hear from you.