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Delegation is one of the most important skills a manager or senior PM develops - and one of the most consistently underdeveloped. The failure mode cuts both ways: delegate too little and you become a bottleneck, do work others should be doing, and limit your own capacity. Delegate poorly and you create confusion, erode trust, and end up doing the work twice 📋

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Why managers don’t delegate enough

The instinct to hold on to work is understandable. You know how to do it, you can do it faster, and it’ll definitely be done the way you’d do it. But those are all short-term arguments that create long-term problems. Not delegating means your team doesn’t develop. It means you can’t scale. And it means you’re spending time on work that isn’t the highest-value use of yours. The new manager trap is almost always a delegation failure at its core 💡

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Delegating effectively

Be clear about the outcome, not the method - tell people what success looks like, not how to achieve it. Specifying the method removes autonomy and prevents the person from finding a better way than yours. Match the task to the person’s development level - stretching someone is good; throwing them into something they’re not ready for without support is not delegation, it’s abdication. Know the difference. Agree on check-in points upfront - not to micromanage, but so the person knows when to surface blockers and you know when to expect updates. Silence as a sign of progress is fine; silence as a sign of being stuck is not. Let them do it their way - if you’ve delegated a task, resist the urge to take it back because you’d do it differently. Different isn’t wrong. Reserve intervention for situations where something is genuinely going wrong, not just going differently than you’d have done it 🙌

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The autonomy ladder

A useful model: there are different levels of delegation, from “do exactly this” to “do whatever you think is right and tell me afterwards.” Match the level to the person’s experience and the stakes involved. A new PM might need “bring me options and we’ll decide together.” A senior PM should be operating at “decide and let me know what you did.” Giving a junior person full autonomy on a high-stakes decision isn’t delegation - it’s a setup for failure. Lesson learned: the first time I properly delegated something I’d been holding onto, the person did it better than I would have. That was both humbling and the most important lesson I got about why delegation matters.