Being a product manager in an enterprise context is different. Heroic firefighting feels productive, but the adrenaline rush of solving urgent problems actually slows you down.

Every crisis you heroically solve prevents you from looking forward. You feel busy and important, but you're falling behind on high-impact problems that could eliminate fires in the first place.

The best enterprise PMs I know resist the firefighting addiction and step back during chaos to understand what these crises reveal about real business challenges.

Instead of celebrating crisis resolution, they document patterns. What systems keep breaking? Which stakeholders always have "urgent" requests? They use firefighting episodes as diagnostic data to identify and fix root causes, turning reactive moments into strategic intelligence.