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

It's prevalant myth that PMs make all the decisions. They make some of the decisions but not all of the decisions. But, a PM is definitely responsible for making sure their team can make high quality decisions at a fast pace. They do this by making sure their teams have access to the right information at the right time. Some examples of how successful PMs do this are

1. Helping the team understand the company / department strategy - This is typically presented to the team as the business context driving the team's work + adjacent teams / departments and their strategies.

2. Bring the customer voice to the team - This is typically presented as the customer needs driving the product focus distilled from both qualitative (eg. customer feedback) and quantitative (usage data)

3. Helping the team understand the market landscape - This is presented as the market the team's product is targetting, competitive offerings in the market, strengths and weaknesses of the competitor compared to your product's strengths and weaknesses.

4. Mostost importantly, helping the team make decisions when they have incomplete information through rigorous logical reasoning and trade off analysis. Identifying the level of risk in the decision and getting buy-in from right level of leadership (higher risk requires a higher level leadership to sign off on the decision).

5. Finally, making sure the team is not revisiting a decision made in the past unless some new and compelling information surfaces that makes it a no-brainer to change the previous decision. This typically involves helping the team document decisions and clearly articulating the rationale for the decision. At Atlassian we use the DACI framework extensively for this purpose.

As you can see, a PM can do a lot to influence decision making without actually being the person to make the decision.

In the few instances where the PM has to be the one to make the decision, it's worth thinking through the worst thing that can happen if you got the decision wrong. You will realize that the stakes are not as high as we make ourselves believe. I like to remind myself that no one's life is at stake if I made a wrong decision, after all I'm building a collaboration software and not a critical medical equipment. It's also useful to remember that you make a lot of decisions in day to day life without breaking a sweat. Why should product decision making be any different?

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.

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.

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).

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.