Five Habits of Highly Annoying Product Managers⁠↗

Best practices from smart people are great and all, but remember—not everything you read about will work within your specific business, market and team. You may be too early-stage for a highly opinionated way of building. Your company may already work in a way that makes it impossible to work differently. You may not have a team that wants to change.

A fourth excellent way to annoy your team is to avoid making a decision, especially until you reach a consensus. Many PMs desperately want to get to a consensus because they worry about upsetting people or being wrong. In practice, this approach just won’t work long-term, and if you ask people, they’ll often tell you that they’d rather you just make a call and move on.

My advice is simple: Prioritize conversation over documentation. It’s easy to default to more documentation and detail every time one of your teammates misunderstands something. Instead, use that experience to narrow in on what types of nuances need to be clarified in writing vs. discussing. Don’t assume more writing and documentation will solve these problems.