Product Owner / PM

Make no decisions yourself. Either let others decide or involve the whole group, ensuring you can’t be held responsible for the outcome or its consequences.

Once you have a detailed, foolproof plan, stick to it rigidly, no matter how the circumstances change. Under no circumstances should you work iteratively or try experiments and pilots. Those might reveal that your plan isn’t perfect, forcing you to adjust it—and that would be a real waste of time.

When estimating workloads, be as dynamic as possible: use a different reference scale for each task, but keep the naming of your unit consistent.

Always remain positive and optimistic, even when the numbers and data clearly indicate otherwise. This way, you’ll keep your employees motivated until the very last moment and deliver the maximum surprise to your stakeholders.

To champion heroics, aim for the hockey stick shape in your burn-up charts. This way, you and your team can showcase how you heroically accomplish an infinite amount of work at the last moment. It also increases your chances of being named Team of the Year.

Seize every opportunity to present your project as red, only to skillfully turn it green at the right moment—proving that you and your team have what it takes to be real heroes. If that’s not feasible, the reverse strategy works just as well: keep your project green until the very end. This shields you from disruptive management attention and lets you step away just before it becomes glaringly, irreversibly red and crashes spectacularly.

When organizing a meeting, make sure to invite more people than necessary—you have to account for no-shows, after all. The meeting title should be as vague as possible, and don’t include an agenda in the invite. This keeps things flexible regarding what the meeting will actually be about, and avoids setting any misleading expectations about concrete outcomes.

Avoid making decisions during a meeting. Instead, point out that key information or essential stakeholders are still missing—clearly justifying the need for another meeting. This demonstrates your deep appreciation for the gravity of such decisions. Plus, it conveniently spares you from having to take sides in any potentially contentious situations.

To support your career ambitions, feel free to shamelessly reuse the content and ideas of others—just rephrase them slightly and present them under a flashy new name as your own groundbreaking innovation. Using bold buzzwords, catchy acronyms, arbitrary statistics, and lots of visuals will help your presentation gain maximum traction with management.

When someone comes to you with a problem, just solve it yourself—preferably with a sigh and a visibly annoyed expression. Avoid giving any helpful explanations. This way, your colleague learns nothing new and won’t develop beyond you. Plus, it’s quicker, earns you respect, and ensures you remain indispensable—not just to that one person, but to the whole team. Your legendary status as the office hero will spread in no time.

A company’s success is, of course, measured by its numbers. And if those numbers don’t quite look the way they should, don’t waste time digging into root causes like poor quality, customer dissatisfaction, or lack of efficiency. Instead, reach for the trusted tool of financial engineering: twist, shift, and massage the figures until they shine—at least for now—regardless of what’s actually going on. The real problems? Simply push them into the next fiscal year, where they’ll either become someone else’s issue or, with a bit of luck, can be creatively rebranded once again.