But a LOT of decisions in reality are ones where there is no clear "organic" owner. In that scenario, assuming nobody else is putting their hand up to own it, that's the PM's responsibility.
Nobody will ever tell you this in interviews, it's never part of the job description, but it is one of the most important parts of being an effective PM.
“If things go well, dev team gets the credit. If things go poorly, PM takes the blame”.
This is fundamental to building trust with the dev team and gaining the respect of leadership.
This made it possible to guide the product in directions the dev team wasn’t immediately comfortable with, because they knew it was my ass on the line. And when those decisions led to good outcomes, it further reinforced the trust relationship.
I haven’t countered many PMs who live by this, but it sure makes a big difference.
We’ve hit industry maturity with ever slimming margins but with management still operating like costs don’t mean anything. If management was doing their jobs they would discover the cost of meetings and ultimately the cost of indecision!
PMs shouldn't have to fix organization dysfunction while operating in Hero Mode.
You're expecting to be able to engage with your engineering team around the relative effort and complexities of different technical solutions... You're gonna need to have an understanding of the underlying technical details.
The way I see it, I don't necessarily need to know how to build the thing (as in, all the implementation details). But I absolutely need to know how the thing we're building works, what all the key moving parts are, and how they relate to each other.
Without that, there's no way I can develop any kind of intuition as to what is and isn't possible, which is CRITICAL when managing expections with customers or internal stakeholders.
So many PMs are either over bearing or scared to make decisions; or, the worst, that do both, over bearing and micromanaging all the time and then blames the team when their decisions back fire.
IMO, the fundamental role of a PM is to make the decisions nobody else wants to (and own the consequences of them). If my team is making progress and decisions are being made, I get the fuck out of the way.
I jokingly refer to myself as the "designated scapegoat", basically meaning it's my job to tank the risk for situations where everyone is nominally in agreement about something, but nobody wants to be the person to put their hand up and own the decision because of the risk if it backfires.