michael sarpong:

Ever signed a contract or offer letter and been faced with a single-page doc that contains over 10 features? In one single file? If you’ve been here before, skip this post, you survived and I salute you. But if not, please… read on.

Because here’s the thing: Without ambiguity, Product Managers wouldn’t even have a job in the first place. What show are you going to run to even start with? Here’s how to navigate the deep sea of ambiguous product problems.

Own the Mess

For starters, your first call to action is to embrace the job with your full chest. You won’t get all the solutions to the problem at once and that’s completely fine. Progress comes when you keep at it and gradually begin putting structures in place to clear the fog. A few factors that can lead to this mess:

• A client or stakeholder hands over a vague scope
• There’s little to no documentation on the product
• Or when there’s just no clear data to back any major decisions

And to be honest, ambiguity can never be taken away but it can be managed. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll make progress.

Collect Information Like Your Life Depends on It

Talk to users, clients, stakeholders everyone. Dig into support tickets, emails, feedback forms… all of it. George Kwame Agyemang can confirm how seriously I take my cadence-by-hand file. At BuukMeNow , we have a living Google Sheet that logs every user interaction, this is our internal way of collecting data to help us build and iterate fast. Information is your ally. The more you gather, the clearer things become and the better you understand what users actually need.

Establish Clear Objectives

Set clear and measurable objectives. Make them lean, realistic and avoid trying to solve world hunger in one sprint. In our case at BuukMeNow , I started something small. Every week, I sit with our business dev and any relevant team member to draft weekly deliverables. We keep it lean. It’s okay not to finish everything the goal is to prioritize what matters and push the rest forward. Breaking big goals into small, focused ones makes progress visible and most importantly, measurable.

Collaborate Intentionally

Building product is a team sport and understanding how the entire system works is crucial. Make time to speak to engineers, designers, QA, business dev, marketing and everyone. Understand their workflows and what constraints they operate within.

At Kayak, where I lead product, we hold stakeholder meetings once a week to share development updates. Fortunately for us, one of the stakeholders is our User Zero which means we’re building with direct user input in mind.

Outside of that, we hold daily stand-ups with the team to keep things moving. I engage QA on testing and best practices, get updates from engineers on implementation and sync with the design team on which experience to rock with. I also loop in the CEO when key decisions need to be made.

This is what collaboration looks like cross-functional, frequent and focused on momentum.

Workshops, quick syncs, async updates, use whatever format works best, but make sure everyone’s aligned. Shared understanding reduces friction and speeds up delivery.

Conclusion

You won’t always walk into projects with perfect clarity. More often than not, you’ll be thrown into the fog and expected to navigate your way out. But that’s the work. Start with what you know, ask thoughtful questions, pull people in and turn ambiguity into small, focused steps. You may not solve everything in one go but you’ll make progress. And that’s what matters.