Being a product manager in an enterprise context is different. Startups ship features and iterate. Enterprise PMs must think: "If we ship this, marketing needs new campaign assets, which means sales needs training, which affects support's Q4 capacity, which delays the compliance initiative legal is counting on."

Second and third-order thinking isn't bureaucracy - it's strategic necessity. Every decision ripples across functions, timelines, and stakeholder commitments. The PMs who anticipate these cascades succeed. The ones who don't spend months in damage control.

The best enterprise PMs I know map dependencies before writing specs. They ask "then what happens?" three times before proposing solutions. Systems thinking separates enterprise PMs who scale from those who stall.