Letting Fires Burn

Great product leaders don’t fix everything—they fix what matters.

Managing software products can be chaos.

Your backlog’s overloaded. A feature’s broken. Customers are loud.

You can fix it all—or you can focus.

The best leaders do the latter.

They let fires burn.

Not out of laziness. Out of discipline.

Because when everything’s urgent, nothing is.

The Discipline of Strategic Neglect

Letting fires burn means choosing to solve the right problem, not every problem.

You’re not paid to keep everything neat.

You’re paid to ship outcomes that move the needle.

Instagram ignored Android. Stripe ignored the support queue.

Fires You Can Let Burn

• Process: Inefficient meetings? Let it ride.

• People: Internal friction? Not all of it needs a fix now.

• Tech: Legacy bugs? Unless it’s blocking users, it can wait.

What Makes a Fire Worth Fighting?

• Will it compound if we solve it?

• Does it unblock critical execution?

• Is it tied to a key business metric?

If not?

Let it burn.

The Real Job

You’re not a firefighter.

You’re a builder.

Your job is to ship the product that makes the fire station obsolete.

Let people get uncomfortable.

Let Slack freak out.

Let process be messy.

If you’re solving the right problem, you’re doing your job.

They focused on leverage, not noise.

“The best founders have a strong sense of which fires are okay to let burn.” — Light Speed Venture Partners

So do the best PMs.

Let it burn.

Build what matters.