I've worked with exactly 1 exceptional product manager. The rest were all horrible and had a negative impact on the product/team.
The simplest thing I can boil it down to is how they respond when asked a question.
With the exceptional PM, when you asked a question you got an answer.
With bad PMs, you ask a question and you get "Good callout! I'll try to get some alignment with our stakeholders on that". Every decision point spins out into this web of stakeholders and cross-functional team buy-in. And no decision is ever made, everything is always in flux and uncertain.
During this process they have produced an entire literature of documentation, each version contradictory to the others. "That feature was only in the original doc, we got rid of it in v2" but also "That feature was in v1, I forgot to copy paste it into v2 but we never canceled it. Sorry!" Every variation of every feature exists somewhere, a kind of superposition of the product out there somewhere.
It consistently amazes me that they never seem to be able to grasp how self-destructive this is to the product development. Or maybe they do, but they just don't care and they are just exploiting their evaluation framework. Probably the latter.
The simplest thing I can boil it down to is how they respond when asked a question. With the exceptional PM, when you asked a question you got an answer.
With bad PMs, you ask a question and you get "Good callout! I'll try to get some alignment with our stakeholders on that". Every decision point spins out into this web of stakeholders and cross-functional team buy-in. And no decision is ever made, everything is always in flux and uncertain. During this process they have produced an entire literature of documentation, each version contradictory to the others. "That feature was only in the original doc, we got rid of it in v2" but also "That feature was in v1, I forgot to copy paste it into v2 but we never canceled it. Sorry!" Every variation of every feature exists somewhere, a kind of superposition of the product out there somewhere.
It consistently amazes me that they never seem to be able to grasp how self-destructive this is to the product development. Or maybe they do, but they just don't care and they are just exploiting their evaluation framework. Probably the latter.