[nicoburns]

Depends what you mean by non-technical. I've worked with product managers who didn't have an engineering background, and thst worked fine as long as they were able to understand the trade offs that we presented to them. I've also worked with product managers who just couldn't grasp any sort of technical nuance. That did not work out well.

I notice you phrase it as "work under", and I wonder if that is part of the issue you've had. Where I've worked, while it was true that the PM was guiding the direction of our work, they weren't our boss- they were simply a part of a team with a different role (in the same way that QA often takes direction from engineers, but they don't work for them). If the relationship you had with your PM was "one way" in this sense, then I can see why you wouldn't like it...