Is an aspiring PM who struggles with decision making absolutely doomed as they consider pursuing PM?

It's hard for me to think anyone is 'doomed' per se but I would make this a focus area if you are truly trying to get into product management. Making smart decisions quickly is a strong product management trait and so to be successful, you will need to be comforatble doing that. I would probably reverse the lens and ask yourself if you would be happy making smart decisions quickly everyday. Does that excite you? If so, then dive into why you can't or don't want to currently. If it is not exciting, consider what you like about product management and see if you can get that same joy in another role.

Product managers are important for a number of reasons:

1. Prioritization to ensure business deliverables are done in the highest value order possible

2. A single point of reference for the business to make trade-offs

3. Consistency of customer voice in the product portfolio

Decision making is not always the task at hand. Sometimes the Product Manager needs to assemble the right people, SMEs, customer context, market information, and present that to the business leaders for a decision. Then the product manager can take action accordingly.

Short answer, no - PMs who have a hard making decisions aren't doomed! Although, it is a good idea to find ways to get out of indecision loops and find opportunities to resolve things quickly.

I believe being decisive is absolutely essential for product people. This is because it unblocks your counterparts and increases velocity if you're able to make game time decisions. Analysis paralysis is the antithesis of velocity. However, being a good product manager means that your decisions are based on a deep understanding of the business and the user and your own product sense that you've gained through releasing software. Decisiveness without that context will only waste engineering cycles and will not lead to meaningful outcomes for your users or your business.

Are you committed to working on this known gap? If not, then I would say this is a deal breaker for becoming an effective Product Manager.

A Product Manager's role is to be able to take multiple, loud, often urgent inputs and be able to identify which opportunities to pursue now, pursue later, or never pursue. You need to make these decisions and micro-decisions on a day to day basis. It's better to make fast, wrong decisions on reversible things than to paralyze and make no decision (which is a decision in itself). I like to think about these as one-way doors or two-way doors. Take your time, build your evidence and confidence on decisions that are difficult to undo. For things that can be undone or reversed quickly, don't waste your time or effort on collecting data and building a case. Run that experiment. Fail fast. Apply previous experience. This gets easier over time as you are able to pattern match and learn frameworks to apply (also known as product intuition).