Judgment Over Velocity: Why Product Leadership Means Knowing When to Say No

Every product leader I know is feeling the same pressure right now: do more, move faster, ship quicker. AI tools promise to accelerate everything: research, prototyping, analysis. And they do. But here’s the uncomfortable truth we need to talk about in 2026: AI is very good at patterns, but product management is about judgment. So if you’re pausing for thought when the noise around you is shouting ‘AI → Ship now!’ then this is for you!

The teams struggling most right now aren’t the ones who can’t move fast enough. They’re the ones who’ve lost the ability to slow down and think clearly about what actually matters.

The Velocity Trap

We’ve created an environment where speed has become a proxy for competence. Ship faster. Iterate quicker. Test more. But velocity without direction is just motion, and motion without judgment is chaos. There are of course caveats – where growth has floundered or features in your backlog have been gathering dust at the expense of ANY iteration then you will need to ramp up some kind of velocity. Once that settles then the rest below will help stabilise your ‘launch’.

Product managers are now asked to deliver business outcomes faster, with less structure, fewer decision forums, and higher expectations for judgment. The support systems that used to help us make decisions (layers of review, stakeholder committees, lengthy approval processes) are thinning out. Some of that’s good. But it means the quality of individual judgment matters more than ever.

What Judgment Actually Looks Like

Judgment isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about having the confidence to make a call with partial information and own the consequences. It’s recognising when a feature request is actually a symptom of a deeper problem. It’s knowing when data is telling you to go one way, but your understanding of the customer says the other.

People like Tony Fadell who’ve built truly transformative products, share this quality: they know when to ignore the noise. They’re willing to say no to good ideas in service of great ones. They can look at ten competing priorities and cut seven of them without flinching.

That’s not intuition. That’s judgment built through experience, mistakes, and the discipline to learn from both.

The AI Paradox

Here’s where it gets interesting. AI can help you generate ten variations of a feature, analyse thousands of customer comments, or prototype an interface in minutes. What it can’t do is tell you whether solving this particular problem matters to your business right now.

The strongest PMs use AI as a thinking partner, not a decision-maker. AI speeds the work, your judgment shapes the direction. I’m seeing too many teams treating AI outputs as recommendations rather than raw material. They’re optimising for what the model suggests rather than what the business needs.

In my current role at Hilo, we use AI extensively for customer research synthesis and competitive analysis. But the moment of real value isn’t when the AI delivers its analysis. It’s when we sit together as a leadership team and debate what it actually means for our strategy. That’s where judgment lives.

How to Build Better Judgment

First, stop treating every decision as if it needs to be made immediately. The urgency culture is real, but most decisions improve with an hour of reflection. Schedule thinking time and protect it fiercely.

Second, document your reasoning. Not your conclusions – your reasoning. When you look back six months later and see where you were right or wrong, it’s the logic that teaches you, not the outcome.

Third, seek out disagreement actively. The people who challenge your thinking are doing you a favour, even when it’s uncomfortable. Build a cohort of people who’ll tell you when you’re wrong.

Action

Identify one thing in your roadmap that doesn’t need to be there. Not the weakest idea – something that’s perfectly fine but doesn’t serve your core strategy. Then remove it.

The discipline of subtraction is how you build the muscle of judgment. Every time you say no to something decent, you’re reinforcing your ability to prioritise what matters. And in 2026, with AI accelerating everything around us, that ability to slow down and choose wisely is the competitive advantage.