Incapable Project Managers; too many unproductive meetings, PM's that require babysitting by their own manager (doesn't that inspire confidence?). Projects that are apparently run by two or more PM's at the same time (and who really knows which controls the project), PM's who don't understand what they are being told (or don't want to), others who couldn't motivate a dog to wag its own tail.
Product Managers who have their heads so far up each others asses that they haven't got a clue what they really want in a product, or from their engineers. Perhaps that's not fair - they want everything, they want it now, and they don't want to spend any money to get it. While there are elements to this that constitute so-called "good business practice", Logitech's Project Managers seem to take this to extremes, resulting in an endless barrage of complex functional requirements with ridiculous cost and schedule restrictions - you can't spec-out, design, build, and validate a "10x Customer Experience" on $2 worth of (mostly new) hardware in 5 months. Especially when you are STILL SPECCCING IT OUT (hardware and software) with 5 months to go until Feature Complete.
Lack of respect. I observed an employee asking the PM for assistance with collecting some data in order to produce a valid document required for a project Gate transition. The manager proceeded to explain that "we're a team", "we're all in this together", and that the employee should stop using the word "I" and get his work done. Ultimately, this employee was unable to accomplish the task effectively, and was called down for it.
I later had a similar experience with this same so-called leader.
