Is it Difficult to be a Stingy Product Manager?

Is it difficult to be a stingy person?
In real life & at a personal level, No.

Is it difficult to be a stingy PM in a professional life?
Yes. Very difficult.
At least that is what my observations tell me.  

If you are a stingy person, naturally you will spend less. 
And even if you spend, you will ensure that you get the maximum out of what you spend. I think that is a fair assessment.

Imagine a PM.
Typically, s/he has a mountain of Backlog in front of him. And he wants to finish that backlog as much as possible, as fast as possible. And that attitude & drive works well for his reputation in his organization.
He is considered an ambitious person.
He is considered a go-to person by his top bosses, by stakeholders. 

Now imagine another PM.
S/he is rather stingy.  She does not hesitate to reply “No”. People say that she replies “No” too often.  She always picks up that smallest feature/enhancement which can produce the highest WOW reaction from the market. She knows that to get WOW from the market, she has to deliver value to the market. Not only deliver Value to the market but this Value must be perceived and appreciated by the market also. She always works and plans by keeping the RoI in mind. And she guns for the highest RoI. She is not driven by some meaningless & actively dangerous metrics like Story Points or Velocity for gauging success. But she keeps a laser-sharp focus on delivered value every Month/Quarter etc and the market feedback.

And here is the catch. To gauge WHAT would create the highest WOW from the market, she must know what would be perceived as “Valuable” by the Market.  For that, she needs to be extremely outward-focused. She is generally able to distinguish between Market Needs and Market Wants. For that, she gathers market feedback often, on a regular basis. She makes the Market Feedback transparent and visible to everybody on the team.  And she uses this feedback to do course corrections as & when required, as early as required. 

That way she avoids producing waste to a great extent. She knows that if any waste gets created in the product, just removing that waste from the product also takes some development effort. And it makes the team demoralized as well.  But being stingy she ensures that the likelihood of generating waste is very less. 

And to top it all, she does not consider her job is to ship more stuff. She thinks her job is to create more value for the product and for the market. She knows that being stingy helps her (and the Org) to ship better value faster. She also knows that creating more value for the market is the way to create more value for her organization and for herself.

Just like a comedian does not think his job is to tell more jokes to the audience.
A comedian thinks his job is to extract more laughs from the audience.