Set up to fail: what senior PMs should know before joining - Senior Product Manager ROLLER Employee Review

Critical decisions about the current features were made in huddles or buried in old meeting transcripts and even Claude hasn’t learned to read minds yet. I wasn’t able to have any handover session to get historical context until three weeks in. The person responsible for handing over was so consumed with maintaining control of my work (attending my meetings, answering on my behalf in Slack, having side conversations with engineers), that their own project deadlines slipped. They stayed visible to stakeholders the whole time, positioning themselves as the go-to person while I was left without the context I needed to lead. Commitments for the GA launch weren't clarified until a month out. New projects outside the agreed launch scope were accepted without consulting the team and without any communication about the trade offs. Asking basic questions got reframed as the problem. I was told I was "pulling on threads that had already been decided." Those threads related to de-risking a GA launch. That's not friction. That's the job. This is what I walked into: features committed to stakeholders before anyone confirmed technical feasibility. Engineers left making real product decisions under time pressure. What gets built that way isn't shaped by what's right for the user. It's shaped by what's fastest to build.