Is my manager actually good?
Someone asked me recently: "hi bro, how do I know if my pm is any good?" Instead of a thousand messages and arguments, here's my version. Maybe it lands for someone. I'm not claiming this is the truth, it's just how I see it and how I work. What matters:
1/ Pattern recognition plus fast thinking.
Being endlessly smart is the baseline. Not much to discuss here. If you're slow to figure things out, if you can't think fast under stress and land a non-obvious answer, it's going to be rough. But without having seen a lot, it's also hard. The moment you widen your horizons, climb out of your usual bubble, you immediately get more interesting ideas and solutions. I catch myself doing this on vacation somewhere in Europe, still testing local app features and constantly asking why they built it that way. Some of it comes in handy two years later in a completely different context.
2/ A healthy intolerance for not giving a damn.
You can't ignore screwups, they'll surface later in the weirdest possible place. I've seen it over and over: the best teams push through the hardest 20% when everyone else has already given up. Half a day faster here, a release shipped before the freeze there, and suddenly you've saved a sprint. Looks like small stuff, but that's exactly what separates a fine manager from a genuinely great one.
3/ The ability to sink into detail and then switch instantly.
This is a combo of different levels of thinking. There are plenty of smart people who can take anything apart down to the last screw, polish any piece of the product to perfection, and love hard problems. But it's easy to get stuck there: tuning one feature for hours, arguing about bucket sizes, endlessly "improving" something that already works.
The point isn't just being able to dig deep. It's knowing fast where the details actually move the business and where it's turned into procrastination dressed up as perfectionism. The strongest managers are the ones who can dive into the most tedious little thing, break it down to atoms, then come back up, look at it all from above and say: "Hold on, why are we doing this at all? Will it have any impact, or are we just burning time?"
4/ Flexible communication at every level.
With executives: argue on facts, don't cave, defend your team's interests. Staying calm, being able to lose locally to win in the long run, that's a separate skill. With juniors: sit down patiently, explain the basics, even when it feels like a waste of time. Don't get angry, support them, but keep them sharp. All of it is a superpower, and definitely not every manager has it. And it matters enormously, because this is what a team's sense of safety and trust is built on.
5/ The ability to fucking grind.
Either you live for what you do, or it shows immediately, and no trendy work-life balance program will save you. Every top person I've seen genuinely loves the process, drives their product stubbornly, and somehow charges everyone around them with it too. You need rest so you don't burn out, but if there's no spark inside, none of the rest means anything. Bottom line: if the product doesn't get you going, don't even start. And without some fanaticism you're unlikely to build something better than anyone else in the world.
That's it!
Stay tuned 🥷🥷🥷