Being a product manager in an enterprise context is different. Annual planning asks you to commit to deliverables 12 months out when you know the market will shift, priorities will change, and half your assumptions will be wrong.

This isn't dysfunction—it's the actual job. You learn to separate durable bets from volatile ones, build conviction on the "what" while staying flexible, and develop judgment that becomes rare and valuable: making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information. By the time you're leading strategy, you've made hundreds of imperfect bets and learned which types of uncertainty actually matter.

The best enterprise PMs I know stop resenting annual planning and start treating it as the skill it is. That's the difference between driving outcomes and managing documents.