Ben Horowitz’s famous memo, “Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager” (referenced in The Hard Thing About Hard Things), lays out a clear contrast between effective and ineffective product managers. Below is a clean summary in my own words, not copied from the book.
| Category | Good PM | Bad PM |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Takes full responsibility for product success and failures. | Blames engineering, leadership, or other teams. |
| Strategy & Vision | Defines clear product vision, priorities, and strategy. | Lacks direction; reacts to requests instead of leading. |
| Market & Customer Understanding | Deeply knows the customer, competition, and market trends. | Makes assumptions; doesn’t research or validate. |
| Requirements & Specs | Writes complete, crisp, thoughtful specs that explain what and why. | Gives vague, incomplete, or confusing requirements. |
| Communication | Keeps teams aligned; communicates proactively and clearly. | Poor communication; surprises stakeholders. |
| Execution & Drive | Pushes projects forward, removes blockers, ensures momentum. | Waits for others to solve problems; gets stuck. |
| Decision-Making | Makes tough calls, prioritizes based on impact. | Avoids decisions; spreads responsibility so no one is accountable. |
| Collaboration | Partners with engineering, design, sales, and marketing effectively. | Creates friction, misalignment, or confusion across teams. |
| Metrics & Learning | Measures success, learns from data, and iterates. | Launches features without tracking outcomes; ignores evidence. |
| Product Storytelling | Can clearly explain the product’s value internally and externally. | Can’t articulate why the product matters or why it will win. |
| Leadership Style | Inspires confidence; leads through influence and clarity. | Delegates leadership to others; operates as an administrator. |
| Problem-Solving | Anticipates issues and proactively addresses them. | Is surprised by predictable issues; blames circumstances. |
Common Issues:
1. Blaming geographically dispersed teams instead of collaborating
In many teams, especially those spread across regions or time zones, a recurring issue is the tendency to blame “the other team” whenever delays or misalignments occur. Instead of treating collaboration as a shared responsibility, people externalize the problem, focusing on which location or group “dropped the ball.” This mindset prevents collective problem-solving and creates an invisible wall between teams. High-performing teams recognize that distributed work requires even stronger communication, tighter coordination, and mutual empathy—not finger-pointing.
2. Criticizing others’ competency, then saying, “I said it would fail.”
A counterproductive behavior that often appears under stress is when someone doubts another team member’s competence, remains hands-off, and later claims they “knew it would fail.” This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Instead of stepping in early to clarify, support, or help course-correct, individuals distance themselves to preserve the appearance of being “right.” This erodes trust and discourages open collaboration. Healthy teams address risks early, elevate concerns with context—not judgment—and invest in making teammates successful.
3. Few leaders take full responsibility for outcomes
A fundamental gap is the lack of true ownership. Many managers or team leads treat responsibility as something to be shared only when outcomes are positive—but distributed when things go wrong. Effective leaders do the opposite: they own the outcome, good or bad, and then work with their teams to understand what needs to change. Ownership is not about absorbing blame—it’s about creating clarity, safety, and direction so others can operate confidently and focus on solutions.
4. Leaders get bogged down in the “how” instead of defining the “what” and “why.”
Instead of setting a clear product direction, vision, and definition of success, some leaders get deeply involved in implementation details. They dictate solutions, approaches, or architectural choices but never clearly articulate what the team is actually trying to achieve or why it matters. This strips engineers of autonomy, creates confusion, and leads to suboptimal solutions because context—not creativity—dictates the work. Strong leadership defines the problem and the outcomes clearly, empowering capable engineers to determine the best path to achieve them.
5. Measuring the wrong metrics during build and delivery
Teams often fixate on metrics that measure correctness or internal technical performance—such as adherence to design specs or the number of defects fixed—but neglect metrics tied to client value, adoption, market share, and real-world impact. Technical accuracy is essential, but it is not enough on its own. A product can be perfectly built and still irrelevant. High-performing organizations prioritize metrics that show whether the product is solving customer problems, creating market advantage, and moving business-level outcomes. When measurement aligns with value, the team naturally orients its decisions toward impact rather than internal validation.
