This might be a simplified generalization but: every good product manager I've had focused on people, every bad one on processes and "simple tricks". Let's tak

This might be a simplified generalization but: every good product manager I've had focused on people, every bad one on processes and "simple tricks". Let's take the automation point for example. Some workers deliver the "theory" graph from the article, some deliver the second. And it's pretty consistent. A good worker knows when automation will pay off and when it's a waste of time. Let everyone try the first time you work with them and only intervene and adjust when necessary. With time you will learn who knows what the hell they're talking about and who doesn't. Who delivers and who just wastes time playing. You have NO way to know before. And even if the investment does not clearly pay for itself for that task: a year ago they let me (linux sysadmin) take time to learn Go for a small thing. I could have done it in python in 1 day, it took me 3 weeks to deliver a Go version. Totally not worth it. But since then I've dived into multiple Go tools we use and significantly reduced our servers hardware requirements. I've even submitted some patches upstream.