The sales director corners you by the coffee machine. "Quick question," she says, "Can we get the enterprise SSO feature moved up? Got a huge deal on the line." You jump into action. You promise to check the roadmap, buffer the engineering lead from the interruption, and take on the burden of negotiating the tradeoff. You walk away feeling like a good PM, a human shield protecting your team's precious focus.
You’re not. You’re becoming a bottleneck.
This instinct to protect, to filter, to translate every request is a common PM failure pattern. It comes from a good place, but it keeps your team in the dark. It stunts their growth and burns you out. A team that can’t function without you as an intermediary isn’t a focused team; it’s a fragile one. Your job isn't to absorb every blow. It's to build a team that can stand on its own.
The High Cost of the Human Shield
When you act as the single gateway between your team and the rest of the company, you create dependencies that will eventually grind you to a halt. Every question, every piece of feedback, every crazy idea has to pass through you.
This has a few toxic side effects:
- You kill context. By the time you
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