If your PM is not smarter than you at strategy, one of you is in the wrong role.
The two best PMs I have worked with had a specific habit. They thought in impact analysis before they thought in features. They asked who was affected, how the problem ranked against everything else competing for engineering hours, what we were trading away by saying yes to this, and what the smallest version of the answer was. By the time the spec arrived, the strategic decision had already been made. The designer’s job was not to validate it. It was to find the artifact that expressed it.
This is uncomfortable for designers who have been taught that they own the customer. They do not. The product owns the customer. The PM owns the product. The designer owns the artifact and the system of artifacts, which is a different and equally hard thing. Confusing the two ruins both jobs.
The rule I work to is simple. If the PM and I are arguing about strategy, one of us is doing the other’s job. If I am pushing back on whether this problem should be solved at all, I have either become the PM or the PM is failing. Either is worth a conversation, but neither is the design conversation. If the PM is telling me which interaction pattern to use, the inverse is true.
The artifacts layer is where the design wins are. The PM does not know whether this should be a modal or a sheet, whether the affordance should be progressive disclosure or a fixed control, whether the empty state should teach or apologise. The PM should not know. That is not a gap in their skill. It is the seam between the roles.
The honest limitation is that some PMs are not strategic. They are project managers with a better title. With them, the designer has to do both jobs, and the work suffers. The right move is not to absorb the strategy work permanently. It is to flag it once, ship the project, and have a calibration conversation about whether the PM is in the right seat.
The shift is to stop competing with the PM for the strategic layer and start out-shipping them at the artifact layer. The designer who does this becomes indispensable to the PMs who matter and irrelevant to the ones who do not.