“The game is rigged because they are strong personalities, they want to get things done, but you don’t have a magic stick — it’s really hard to deliver results if you cannot say no.” – Njegos Ilic
This is a Product Owner week, where we interview Njegos Ilic, a product owner, and cover the same topics we usually cover, but from the PO perspective!
Njegos shares a failure from early in his career as a product owner in startup environments, where he found himself saying yes to every stakeholder request. Working with strong-willed founders who expected things done their way, Njegos fell into the trap of trying to please everyone — building everything that was asked without pushing back.
The result was predictable: scattered priorities, no room to pivot, and a product backlog driven by the loudest voice in the room rather than real user needs. But Njegos frames this failure with a perspective that product owners at any stage can learn from. He compares the learning process to watching children learn to walk — stumbling and falling is not a sign of weakness, it’s a necessary step in the process of growing.
His advice to product owners currently stuck in this pattern: don’t try to avoid failures too hard, because you might prevent yourself from learning the most important lessons. Instead, treat failure as a feedback loop — something happened, you can measure it, and you can change your approach. The key is doing the actual work of reflection: What did I do? What should have been different? What wasn’t possible to change, and why?
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you said yes to a stakeholder request even though your gut told you it wasn’t the right call — and what would it take for you to say no next time?
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About Njegos Ilic
Njegos is a motivated and forward-thinking Product Manager and Agile Project Manager with experience in fast-paced SaaS environments. He empowers teams through leadership and guidance across product development. With a Lean mindset, he simplifies complexity, delivers in small, testable increments, and leverages rapid feedback loops to prioritize outcomes over output.
You can link with Njegos Ilic on LinkedIn.
