In my first months as a PM, I* was more of a “prioritization machine” than a PM. Not in a good way. Engineers would ask me to help prioritize their projects, assuming that I had more context on what they should be working on. Sometimes I would spend the entire day answering questions about prioritization. I felt important -- after all, isn’t this what PMs are supposed to do? Take full accountability of a team’s decisions and outcomes? I soon realized that while I felt effective, I really was just stroking my own ego -- and if a teammate had to wait on my decision, I was the biggest bottleneck. Instead, I needed to design a way for teammates to feel that they had agency to make their own decisions.