A few years ago, I had my eye on a new Peloton bike. I kept thinking of the ad of a fit mom in her spandex sweating through a workout at the break of day in her modern, uncluttered living room. Just as she toweled off and stepped off her bike, her youngster came running into the frame and gave her a hug, signaling the official start of her hectic day.

Fast forward to New Year’s 2024 and I finally bought one. It wasn’t because I like to make New Year’s resolutions; I do that daily.

Peloton was running a sale. And I’d finally realized I wasn’t going back to teaching group fitness, a side gig I’d embraced for a decade between 2010-2020.

For the first few years after the pandemic, I wasn’t sure I wanted to give it up, but as my career and responsibilities grew, I finally realized something important: sometimes I like to be told what to do.

The competence trap for product managers

In startups, where your objectives often hinge on change and impact, early success comes from doing it all. Your outcomes depend on your versatility, adaptability, and drive. Over time, that well-rounded competence becomes a trap door, preventing you from jumping to the next level.

Why? Because you’re too busy doing it all. To scale the venture (or your personal potential), you must rely on others.

My mom once bought me a t-shirt that said, “You’re not the boss of me” — a reflection of what I used to say to her as an Aries-born child. We’re all leaders in our own domains; most of us enjoy the freedom to make our own decisions and to choose our own destinies. Many people are highly successful playing multiple roles at once.

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But that only gets you so far. To scale our impact, each of us requires input, direction, and support from others. Professionally, I’ve struggled with being okay leaning on others, especially with delegating.

I’ve been working on improving it for years, because while part of me still sees it as “passing the burden,” I know it’s actually providing opportunity.

Why scaling impact requires letting go

As responsibilities expand, the instinct to maintain control becomes counterproductive. You may feel responsible for filling every gap, fixing every broken process, or ensuring every deliverable crosses the finish line.

But doing everything yourself isn’t leadership — it’s a bottleneck.

Delegation is what breaks the cycle.

A framework for leadership at every level

Think about the different skillsets needed for setting goals, determining strategy, and executing. In endurance sports like Ironman races, one group defines the race format, another brings the event to life, and yet another competes.

Your professional life also reflects this dynamic. Goals are set, strategies are devised, and execution is carried out — often by different people with different strengths.

I raised this concept in a recent executive coaching session. My coach labeled the idea “shapers-spine-specialists,” validating where my thoughts were heading.

To make this idea useful in a product environment, we can translate the Ironman analogy into a practical model for how you and your teams can share ownership.

Introducing the shapers-spine-specialists model

This framework mirrors your Ironman metaphor but maps directly to product orgs:

Shapers: Owning the vision and defining the problem

Ironman: Who decides we need to climb 7,432 feet in America’s toughest Ironman? Shapers are the ones listening to athletes, studying the market, and designing a challenge intended to test human capability

Professional setting: These are your organizational leaders. They understand the market, competition, and long-term strategy. They articulate the vision and outcomes

How PMs fit in:

• Own problem framing and success metrics
• Clarify what matters and why
• Ask for resources or clarity when the vision is incomplete
• Don’t dictate solutions or play every role in the system

Spine: Translating goals into strategy and structure

Ironman: The operational team partners with cities, marks the course, briefs volunteers and safety officials, and orchestrates the entire event

Professional setting: Strategy builders turn vision into a plan. This includes senior and mid-level leaders translating goals into execution frameworks

How PMs fit in:

• Create roadmaps, define MVPs, and sequence work
• Collaborate with engineering managers, tech leads, and design
• Delegate task breakdown, architecture decisions, and design iterations
• Stay aligned but avoid doing the specialists’ work

Specialists: Executing with expertise and autonomy

Ironman: The athletes. They train, fuel, study the course, and execute the plan with discipline

Professional setting: Individual contributors with domain expertise — engineers, designers, analysts — execute the solution

How PMs fit in:

• Provide context, acceptance criteria, and decision clarity
• Unblock, clarify, communicate, but don’t build
• Trust the experts with their craft

How these roles work together: The human-body metaphor

You can do one or two things really well at a time. The brain is essential, but it can’t walk itself. It relies on the musculoskeletal system to move. The legs are useless without structure, and that structure is useless without direction.

The same is true in product management. Having a set of “legs” (executors) is only useful if they know where they’re going and why. Occasionally a “body” hits its limits and external forces like collaboration and feedback help it grow beyond what it knew it could do.

Just as no one would place a group of brains on a track and ask them to run a mile, no one should expect strategic roles to set vision, build process, run the marathon, and juggle 15 balls simultaneously. You can do one well or all poorly.

Put the brain inside a functional system, resource it well, and suddenly it can run.

Practical delegation tips for product managers

Now, let’s turn our attention towards some practical delegation tips that you can take back to your product team:

1. Learn what’s expected of you — Understand your responsibilities within the shapers-spine-specialists framework. Where are you adding value? Where are you performing someone else’s job?
2. **Outperform what’s expected without doing everything **— Ambition is good, but exhaustion isn’t. Remember that boundaries are essential
3. **Ask insightful questions, not critical ones **— If you need clarity, ask. If you need resources, ask. Curiosity builds alignment; criticism shuts it down
4. **Set and/or influence strategy **— Even if you’re not the ultimate shaper, you can influence direction by connecting customer needs, data, and constraints
5. **Translate strategy into roadmaps **— Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) “Working Backwards” method is a powerful tool for structuring work around customer value through a one-page press release
6. Execute with confidence — You know where you’re going and why. Tradeoffs happen, just make sure that you communicate openly. Stay close enough to care, far enough away to let others lead
7. Celebrate the finish line — Reflect together: What worked? What didn’t? What should change next time? Improvement is everyone’s job, not just yours

Final thoughts: You can’t be the hero and the system

Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re so ubiquitous and omnipresent that you can fill all roles simultaneously. You can’t, and no one should expect you to.

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It’s not heroic. If anything, trying to shoulder all the problems of your product team can lead to creating a single point of failure.

Instead, focus on developing the mind-body-muscle connection of your team. Make roles and responsibilities clear. Clarify the vision, develop the plan, and let people execute.

Because when a highly trained, well-directed team is in motion, it can achieve far more than the sum of its individual parts.

Featured image source: IconScout

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