192 / David Pereira: How Product Teams Can Deliver More Value By Doing Less Work

Product teams often struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes. Why? Because they confuse activity with progress. Understanding that challenge is the focus of our chat with David Pereira, recorded in person at the 2026 ITX Product + Design Conference, in Rochester, NY.

David is a product management coach, speaker, and author of Untrapping Product Teams: Simplify the Complexity of Creating Digital Products. He has spent that past 17 years helping organizations create more value by eliminating busy work. In his conference workshop and keynote, David drew from his work with product teams around the world, explaining how eliminating unnecessary work, validating assumptions early, and staying close to customers enable teams to make better decisions and build products that solve real problems.

Eliminate Busy Work to Create More Value

Many organizations unintentionally create systems that reward activity instead of outcomes, David argues. Excessive meetings, backlog maintenance, and decision making based on conjecture rather than evidence consume valuable time without moving products forward.

Rather than accepting these practices as status quo, David believes that product leaders should ask whether these activities contribute to customer or business value. Set clear boundaries around focus time and make every meeting earn its place on the calendar, he adds.

“Bullshit management is an art,” Davids says. “It’s the art of doing things that create no value, but drain everyone’s energy.”

Build To Learn: Testing Assumptions Before Crafting Solutions

David’s central message in his day 1 conference workshop is that successful product teams learn before they build. Teams naturally become attached to their ideas, making it easy to seek evidence that confirms existing beliefs instead of challenging them. By identifying assumptions, prioritizing the most critical risks, and defining success criteria before running experiments, teams can quickly separate fact from opinion. AI can accelerate experiment design, but only when it supports disciplined learning – not when it replaces critical thinking.

“You will build to learn, because you’ll learn from reality,” David continues. “If you don’t do that, you’re gonna make something that only works in fantasy.”

Customer Reality Should Drive Every Product Decision

In a return to timeless product principles, David reinforces the mantra that decisions should be grounded in real customer behavior rather than internal assumptions. Using examples drawn from his own work, David reveals customer friction that internal discussions had completely overlooked. For product managers and UX professionals alike, direct observation remains among the most effective ways to uncover opportunities that analytics and meetings often miss.

“You need to go and check the users’ reality,” David says. “Because if you limit your discovery to the clinical environment of your cozy office, you’ll quickly learn that that is not how users work. You need to get out there to truly understand their reality.”

• [03:29] Bullshit management is the art of doing things that create no value, but drain your energy. The more bullshit you do, the less value you create.

   

• [04:47] [As a product manager,] your job is to simplify what others complicate. So many times we have meanings because it’s the default way of collaborating. So we need to step back and say, what on earth am I trying to achieve?
• [05:51] We all need time for focus. So I block my morning; nobody can reach out to me in the morning because it’s the time I’m going to do deep work. As for meetings, they need to have a few things: what is the objective? What is the context? And what is agenda? If the meeting invitation can’t answer those questions, I immediately reject.
• [09:56] In order to test our assumptions, we need to understand the following: If my assumption is proven false, is my idea still valid? If yes, you can ignore this assumption because your idea will still survive. But if the assumption is proven false, my idea is worthless and I start looking at things differently.
• [17:05] When [AI-driven] execution becomes cheap, where do you put your energy? Your energy goes to thinking, decision making. But thinking and decision making should be a collaborative exercise, not a siloed one.
• [20:49] What is NIHITO? NIHITO is ‘nothing important happens in the office.’ It’s an important lesson about how teams and organizations make product decisions. We need to get out of the office and into our users’ environment if we are ever to understand their reality.

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