[austin-cheney]

I can remember when Travelocity was failing in its final days before becoming an Expedia white label. They brought in some top product management consultants to advise on strategy. Their guidance was mostly common sense but put the internal product managers into an impossible position.

As a world class product manager you must be willing to advocate for positions that are career suicide at most large corporations. For example, tech stacks become more expensive and less flexible over time, so in order to pivot a product to achieve greater market penetration might mean abandoning the current stack. Tech teams will fight you to death on this because their first priority is to remain employed everything else be damned. As a result most product managers are hardly world class.