A Product Manager's Halloween

It's almost Halloween and I've got the uneasy feeling that product management is haunted. With Q4 planning in full swing, now's the time to exorcise the patterns that will undermine next year's execution. In my 20+ years in B2B SaaS I've seen these beastly apparitions afflict even great product teams.

Is your product a Frankenstein or a zombie? Are you pursued by a vampire customer? Do the ghosts of features past haunt your support team? Have hype demons possessed your roadmap? Does your strategy change shape with every full moon?

Below is a field guide for spotting these monsters in your roadmap so you can stop living in a product management nightmare. Here's how to identify which product monsters are haunting your organization.

Frankenstein Products

Your product has every feature customers asked for, but sales cycles keep getting longer. Your sales team can’t get through a demo without your help. Customers return to support just to complete daily tasks. You might have a Frankenstein product.

Frankenstein products fail because they lack clear positioning: they don’t solve an obvious, valuable problem for a well-defined market in a way that’s distinct from competitors. Features sprawled organically, one RFP at a time; nobody made them coherent. “Comprehensive” products lose to less feature-rich rivals that deliver faster time-to-value and a sharper story.

How to kill this monster:

• Identify your ICP: Choose the customer profile you are going after and decide to win that segment decisively. Find the key thing that customer needs you to do for them and do it well.
• Prune or package: Retire low-signal features, or move them behind configuration/add-ons so the base product tells a coherent story.
• Focus the message: Collapse demos to the core outcome; hide/de-emphasize edge cases. Create talk-tracks that reframe “missing features” as strength through focus.
• Align GTM: Arm sales and marketing with the positioning, customer insights, and reference wins, so they lead with your differentiators, rather than lean on feature parity.

Products aren’t parts lists. They need identity and purpose to be valued. Treat new features as compounding investments: optimize for depth and coherence so ROI rises while complexity stays in check.

Zombie Products

You shipped “the right thing,” but adoption is flat. Marketing begrudgingly did a press release, Sales shrugged, and your support team got lost when calls came in. If you haven’t thought through the launch, your product can become a zombie, grasping on to some early adopters but not really thriving.

Zombie products become moribund from distribution neglect: no effective channel, no launch plan, weak enablement, and no designed path to first value. Building is half the job, the other half is getting it into the hands of the right people and guiding them to an undeniable “Aha.”

How to bring it back to life:

• Pick a channel. Choose a primary channel to reach your segment (e.g., marketplace, partner, targeted outbound, product-led trial). Tailor your launch strategy accordingly.
• Ensure first value. Help the customer see the value quickly. Build in a simple onboarding, default templates, and a near-term target for activation.
• Empower internal teams. Make sure your teams are ready to reach out to the right customers, explain the benefits, and support users.
• Track your progress. Define your metrics, review adoption, listen to early users. Learn and iterate features/packaging/pricing or pivot channels if the numbers don’t move.

The launch doesn’t end after a splashy blog post; thinking through distribution, enablement, and measurement is crucial to the process. If you can’t say who it’s for, where they’ll hear about it, why they’ll act now, and how they hit first value, you haven’t really shipped.

Vampire Customers

Your most demanding customer pays on time, engages deeply, and likes your LinkedIn posts. But they consume endless resources with customization requests, drain your roadmap with special asks, and their success never translates to broader market traction. You invited them in. Now they're bleeding you dry.

Vampire customers emerge when you mistake an individual for a market. That enterprise whale with unique needs looks like validation, but you're actually building a services business disguised as a product. Every custom feature earns you a high-five but won't drive repeated sales to similar customers. The short-term revenue feels good; the long-term growth loss is invisible until you've already bled out.

How to drive the stake through this pattern:

• Prioritize adoption: For each major feature or customization, count how many other customers adopted it within 90 days. Hold yourself and the team accountable for breadth of impact.
• Consider opportunity cost: Factor in implementation time, ongoing support, and especially what projects you are sacrificing. That $500K whale deal might cost you $2M in lost market momentum.
• Flip the question: Don't ask "Can we win this deal?" Ask "If we win this deal, will it make the next ten easier or harder?" If the answer isn't clearly "easier," walk away.
• Design for repeatability: When a request arrives, ask how you'd deliver it to 100 customers before building it for one. If you can't envision the repeatable version, decline the custom work.

The siren song of a big logo and immediate revenue makes it easy to rationalize one-off work. But vampire customers don't just drain resources, they rob you of the opportunity to grow in the long term. Product businesses scale by solving the same problem many times, not by solving different problems for whoever pays the most.

Ghostly Features

Your product carried features forward from years past, things that shipped with fanfare but now linger with minimal usage. A handful of loyal users depend on them, and internal champions still defend them, but they haunt your codebase with maintenance costs and your support team with edge-case tickets. Dead features that won't rest in peace.

Ghostly features accumulate from deferred pruning decisions. Older products especially accrue features that never achieved broad adoption but also never got explicitly killed. Each one seems harmless individually, but collectively they create drag: QA burden, upgrade complications, UI clutter, and support complexity. The cost is real but diffuse, so it's always easier to ship the next thing than remove the last.

How to exorcise these spirits:

• Audit the graveyard: Instrument feature usage if you haven't already. Set a meaningful adoption threshold. Anything below the line goes on the deprecation list.
• Make it visible: Track support tickets, bug reports, and engineering time per feature. Add up the numbers to sell your deprecation case to stakeholders.
• Retire with empathy: For features with loyal users, provide migration paths or grandfathering. Communicate early, offer alternatives, and treat sunset as product work, not housekeeping.
• Think before you ship: For new features, define your success threshold upfront. If you can't say what "good adoption" looks like in 90 days, you're setting up tomorrow's ghost.

Product management isn't just about what you add, it's equally about what you remove. Before shipping that "one small thing," ask whether it will create impact across your customer base or become a burden. The discipline to kill features is what keeps products sharp and teams efficient.

Hype Demons

Your roadmap suddenly includes AI features, blockchain integrations, or whatever trend dominates the tech headlines. Leadership is excited, competitors are announcing similar capabilities, and you feel the dark power of earned media. You've been possessed by hype.

Hype demons possess teams through strategy abdication: when FOMO replaces customer understanding and trend-chasing masquerades as vision. Those AI features get shipped at the expense of your roadmap, then adoption lags and the hype doesn’t turn into renewals.

How to exorcise the demon:

• Start with the job: Before exploring any trend, anchor in the specific customer problem and current workflow. Does AI offer a unique opportunity to make that job faster, cheaper, or better? 
• Measure real impact: For every hype-driven initiative, define the long-run KPI. "Engagement with AI features" isn't a business metric, revenue impact, cost reduction, or (crucially) retention lift is.
• Test small, learn fast: Treat trendy capabilities as experiments, not commitments. Ship the minimum viable version to a small segment, measure adoption and impact, then decide.
• Protect the core: Reserve capacity for unsexy work that drives the business: performance gains, product quality, core workflows. Hype demons thrive when you neglect fundamentals.

Real product strategy means having the discipline to say no to shiny objects when they don't serve your customers' actual needs. AI might be transformative, but only if it transforms something your customers care about. Otherwise, you're just making noise while your competitors solve real problems.

Shapeshifter Strategies

Your priorities morph with every customer call, competitor announcement, or board meeting. Last quarter's focus becomes this quarter's distraction. Teams start projects they never finish, Sales doesn't know what to pitch, and your product managers spend more energy managing optics than delivering impact. When the full moon rises, your strategy transforms again, and everyone howls in frustration.

Shapeshifter strategies emerge from decision avoidance and misalignment: leadership hasn't made the hard calls about where to play and how to win, so every new signal triggers a pivot. Internal teams aren’t aligned on what success looks like so they work against each other toward different goals. Without clarity, teams thrash, velocity plummets, and politics becomes more useful than judgment.

How to break the curse:

• Answer the hard questions: Do you have evidence that a defined segment will pay for what you're building? Is everyone on board? If the answer is unclear, admit you're still searching for fit.
• Make explicit trade-offs: Identify your boundaries as clearly as your priorities. What customer segment will you walk away from? What feature category is off-limits?
• The “saying no” test: Clarify your strategy so your team can make decisions without you. Can they can't confidently say "no" to requests that fall outside the strategy without getting fired?
• Build momentum: Give initiatives time to generate signal before pivoting. Frequent course corrections feel responsive but destroy the compounding value of sustained focus. 

Strategy isn't about perfection; it's about making choices clear enough that teams can move fast without constant executive arbitration. When priorities shift weekly, you're signaling that you don't know what matters, and your team optimizes for optics instead of outcomes. Clear and consistent strategy gives teams the confidence to execute and win.

Banish The Monsters

This Halloween, the scariest thing in your portfolio might not be market conditions, it might be the product monsters lurking in your own organization. You can be the Van Helsing of product managers, but first you have to recognize what’s haunting you and commit to the exorcism. Which monster is stalking your roadmap right now?