Why PMMs Who Resist Systematisation End Up as Slide Factories

Most PMMs feel overworked, undervalued, and trapped in endless deck churn. That frustration is real. But the diagnosis most people land on is wrong—and it quietly locks them into the very dynamic they hate.

The PMMs most insistent that this work cannot be systematised are often the same ones who feel overworked, undervalued, and treated as slide factories. They defend craft while remaining trapped inside it.

That's not hypocrisy. It's a feedback loop. And understanding it is the first step to escaping it.

The Lived Reality PMMs Are Reacting To

The day-to-day pain is familiar to anyone who has spent time in the role.

Constant rework. No durable artefacts. Launches that reset every quarter. Messaging that fragments the moment a new stakeholder appears. Every new executive asks for a fresh version of the truth. Nothing sticks, nothing compounds, and nothing remembers.

You build a competitive battlecard. Three months later, someone asks for a new one because they can't find the old one. You create positioning for a product launch. Six weeks later, a new PM reframes the roadmap and your positioning needs to start over. You develop sales enablement materials. A reorganization means training a whole new team from scratch.

The treadmill never stops. And the work never accumulates into anything lasting.

The Intuitive But Flawed Conclusion

Faced with this reality, PMMs reach for an explanation that feels true.

"This work is too nuanced to systematise."

"Templates cheapen judgement."

"Standardisation turns PMMs into order-takers."

"Every situation is different. You can't cookie-cutter strategic thinking."

These statements contain truth. PMM work does require judgement. Context does matter. Nuance is real.

But the conclusion drawn from these truths is exactly backwards.

Where the Logic Breaks

Here's the inversion most PMMs miss: the absence of systems is not preserving value. It's forcing PMMs into per-unit labour.

When nothing you create survives beyond the immediate use case, your value gets measured in output volume and responsiveness rather than in durability or leverage. That's how you end up as a slide factory. Not because leaders lack respect, but because nothing you produce survives long enough to earn it.

The pain gets misdiagnosed.

Instead of seeing the absence of systems as the root cause, PMMs locate the problem in resourcing, respect, or executive misunderstanding. All of those can be true. But they're secondary. The primary issue is that their output lives in disposable artefacts.

Systematisation flips that dynamic.

Once work compounds, you stop being the person who makes things and start being the person who designed how things work. Decisions travel further. Fewer explanations are needed. The organisation leans on what you built even when you're not in the room. That's where status and trust come from.

Craft as a Defensive Posture

To protect their value, PMMs double down on craft.

They emphasise nuance, context, and judgement because those are the only things that make the workload feel defensible. If the work can't be standardised, then the volume feels justified. If every deck is unique, then the treadmill has meaning.

Over time, that becomes identity.

The role shifts from "operator building leverage" to "artisan protecting territory." Systems feel like a threat not because they reduce quality, but because they expose how much effort was compensating for structural gaps.

When nothing compounds, effort becomes the only visible signal of value. Craft, nuance, and bespoke work stop being tools and start becoming protection.

That's why the slide factory complaint coexists with resistance to infrastructure. The system would remove the grind, but it would also remove the proof of effort. And in many organisations, effort has been the only visible signal of value.

So PMMs stay busy, stay tired, and stay indispensable in the narrowest possible way.

What Systematisation Actually Changes

Systems are scaffolding, not substitution.

They hold memory, sequence, and structure. Judgement still lives with humans. But judgement applied once—captured in a system—travels further than judgement applied repeatedly in isolation.

Consider the difference:

Without systems: You build a positioning framework for a launch. It lives in a deck. Next quarter, someone asks for positioning and you start from scratch because no one can find the deck, and even if they could, it wouldn't map to the new context.

With systems: You build a positioning framework that lives in a structured template with clear inputs and documented reasoning. Next quarter, someone needs positioning. They pull the framework, adapt the inputs, and get 80% of the way there. You provide judgement on the 20% that requires it.

Same judgement. Different leverage.

Systematisation shifts a PMM from maker to designer—from reacting to shaping. You stop being the person who writes every deck and start being the person who designed how decks get written.

Why This Feels Threatening

Acknowledging why this shift feels risky is important.

Systematisation removes the need to be involved in everything. For a historically underpowered role, letting go of indispensability can feel dangerous, even when it's the path to leverage.

If you've built your credibility on being the person who can handle any request, designing systems that let others handle requests feels like giving away your job security.

But the uncomfortable truth is that systematisation is often the escape hatch. Taking it requires letting go of being needed for every single thing. That's a hard psychological shift in a role that has historically been underpowered and under-recognised.

The PMMs who make this shift discover something counterintuitive: their influence expands as their direct involvement contracts. They become more valuable by doing less—because what they do matters more.

The Irony at the Centre of the Role

The irony is sharp.

The PMMs most afraid of being reduced to templates are often already doing template work—manually, invisibly, and without compounding credit.

Every time you rebuild a competitive comparison from scratch, you're doing template work. You're just doing it inefficiently. Every time you recreate messaging for a new stakeholder, you're following a pattern. You're just not documenting it.

Systems don't erase judgement. They make judgement durable. They make it legible, reusable, and scarce.

The PMMs who resist structure defend craft to protect value, but craft without systems guarantees exhaustion. Systems without judgement are brittle. The leverage lives in the middle—and that's exactly the ground most PMMs have ceded.

The Better Question

The question isn't "can this be systematised?"

The better question is: "Where should judgement live, and where should the system carry the weight?"

Some decisions require human judgement every time. Strategic positioning against a new competitor. Messaging for a genuinely novel product category. High-stakes executive communication.

Other decisions follow patterns. Competitive battlecard structure. Launch checklist sequencing. Sales enablement content formats. These should live in systems so that judgement can be reserved for where it actually matters.

The PMMs who thrive in the next era of the function will be the ones who can tell the difference—and who build the infrastructure that lets their best thinking travel further than the next slide deck.

The Escape Hatch

The goal is not to flatten PMM work.

It's to let it finally travel further than the next slide deck.

Systems don't replace the craft. They amplify it. They take judgement that would otherwise disappear into a forgotten folder and make it visible, durable, and compounding.

The PMMs still defending purely artisanal work will keep running on the treadmill. They'll stay busy, stay tired, and stay frustrated that no one recognises their value.

The PMMs who build systems will watch their influence expand while their workload becomes sustainable. They'll shift from proving effort to demonstrating impact.

Same role. Different leverage.

The choice is clearer than it appears.