Unblocking engineers when the PM's decisions and specs slow the team down

As a product manager, how do you deal with becoming the bottleneck for your engineering team, so that engineers are waiting on you before they can move forward? ```hint Name what they were waiting for Engineers waiting on the PM is only the symptom. Pin down whether the queue was decisions, specs, answers about customers or sign-offs, and why that work had piled up on you rather than on someone else. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should the answer walk through one time this happened to you, or describe how you would handle it in general? - Is the situation one team waiting on you, or several engineering teams sharing your time? - Is the bottleneck something you control, such as slow specs or decisions, or a rule that requires your sign-off on every change? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - How the candidate noticed they were the constraint, ideally from signals before engineers complained - A diagnosis of the root cause rather than a promise to work harder - The immediate steps that unblocked the waiting engineers, in a sensible order - Lasting changes to decision rights, documentation or planning so the queue does not rebuild - Ownership and candor: how the candidate told the team and their manager, and what the measurable outcome was ### Follow-up Questions - You hand a class of decisions to the tech lead, and they make a call you would not have made. What do you do? - Which signals would tell you that you are about to become the bottleneck again? - Your leadership insists that every scope change still goes through you. How do you keep the team moving?