Avoiding this kind of "leadership" is especially crucial for product owners on interdisciplinary teams, like game teams. There you might have 20-50+ people acro

Avoiding this kind of "leadership" is especially crucial for product owners on interdisciplinary teams, like game teams. There you might have 20-50+ people across engineering, design, planning, art, QA, analytics, and business development, all of whom have separate and conflicting goals and incentives. At bigger companies you'll also have partners and stakeholders outside the team. Balancing all of these interests means that you have to be saying "no" most of the time, and you have to be able to do so in a way that doesn't alienate people. Being wishy washy in those situations leads to an unfocused product that can't ship on time, and a team that becomes disengaged and increasingly bitter as conflicts begin happening one-on-one without any mediation. Being effective at that level is really difficult, and as easy as it may be to criticize leaders who are bad at it, it's really a rare leader that excels across the board. Keep that in mind when judging failures, it's always easy to point out when people mess up when you don't truly understand the scope of the problems they're facing. There's a reason good leaders are paid so well.