The Hero PM
Owns every decision personally. Works late. Fixes blockers themselves. Looks heroic for a quarter. Then the team is dependent on them, no one else can step in, and the PM burns out. Heroics solve a sprint; they create the failure mode of the year.
The Rescue
A senior PM parachutes into a struggling project to "save it." If they actually fix it, leadership concludes the old PM was the problem. Often the old PM was a symptom; the rescue treats the symptom. The team learns to wait for rescues instead of asking for help when small.
The Death March
Yourdon's 1997 coinage. A project where the schedule, the scope, or the team is at least 50% off what's reasonable — and everyone knows it. People work nights and weekends. The PM's job becomes triage, not leadership. Yourdon's uncomfortable observation: most software professionals will experience at least one death march, and the framework for surviving it is different from the framework for running a healthy project.
↳ spotting a death march early