Dealing with uncertainty, and defining a direction forward where there is not a lot of clarity, is really what product management is all about. If it wasn’t, no one would need a PM – they could just design / build / market / sell the next thing on their own.

Striking the balance between careful deliberation that can turn into hesitation on one hand, and charging ahead with blinders on on the other hand (those are the „bro-duct managers“) is one of the most difficult challenges as a PM. Deliberate about the uncertainty too much, and you will find it hard to motivate the team and get buy-in into the product direction; commit to one course of action too strongly and you might hurl the team into a wall at 100mph.

„Bro-gram management“ (thanks for that term!) works until it doesn’t, in which case it comes crashing down. If you keep pretending that the answers to hard questions are easy, a time will come when your answer was wrong – and recovering from that, after having positioned your guidance as essentially infallible, will be hard.