Stop Firefighting
Firefighting is one of those words that everyone in product seems to know. It describes the endless cycle of reacting to crises, and it feels strangely noble while you’re in it. You’re running from one emergency to the next, patching leaks, calming people down, making decisions on the fly. It even looks like progress because things are always moving. But if you step back, you realize you’re not building much. You’re just putting out fires that should never have started.
I’ve been in environments where firefighting was the default. Some of it came from shaky infrastructure, systems that were too fragile to handle scale, or riddled with security gaps that turned every breach into a sprint. It was tempting to think the answer was more engineers, but the real issue was that the foundation itself was wrong. Like a house with bad wiring, the lights will always flicker no matter how many electricians you call in.
Another part of it came from leadership. Priorities shifted weekly. One week we were told to focus on revenue, the next it was retention, then it was partnerships. None of these goals were bad, but the constant swinging meant we never had time to go deep. We learned to chase the latest fire drill instead of thinking about the business model. Over time, you stop expecting clarity from the top and just start waiting for the next ping.
And then there’s the human layer. Teams get caught in subtle dramas. Conflicts that never get resolved, responsibilities that blur until no one feels accountable, a lack of psychological safety that makes people hide problems instead of raising them. All of this adds fuel to the fire. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where everyone knows something is broken but no one wants to say it out loud, you’ve seen how a fire can smolder quietly until it becomes an inferno.
The strangest part is how addictive firefighting becomes. I know PMs, and at times I’ve been one, who secretly enjoyed it. Being the firefighter makes you feel needed. You’re the hero who saves the day. It feels fast and alive. But it’s also deceptive. You start to confuse constant motion with real effectiveness. You’re busy, yes, but not necessarily useful. The team gets used to reacting instead of planning, and after a while nobody even remembers what proactive work looks like.
The way out starts with realizing firefighting is not inevitable. It feels like it is because problems in organizations are never-ending. Solve one and another appears. But not all problems are equal. The real skill is learning which ones to fight. That requires strategy. Without it, you’re just trading one fire for another.
When I finally saw this clearly, it was almost disorienting. I realized most of the stress we carried wasn’t from the problems themselves but from the lack of clarity about which problems actually mattered. Once the company strategy was sharper, everything downstream became calmer. The fires didn’t vanish, but they stopped dictating the agenda. Instead of reacting to every flare-up, we began to choose which risks to let burn and which to contain. That was the first real taste of being proactive.
It turns out proactive work looks a lot less dramatic than firefighting. It’s infrastructure upgrades that no one notices, conversations with leadership to pin down priorities before they swing again, building trust inside teams so that issues surface early instead of late. It doesn’t give you the adrenaline rush of saving the day, but it compounds in ways firefighting never can. The boring fixes become advantages, because they free up time and energy to do the work that actually moves the product forward.
The challenge is that you only see this after you’ve lived inside the fire long enough to realize it never ends. That’s when you start to crave something else. And once you’ve had a taste of proactive work of building instead of patching, you never really want to go back.