[yodon]

The person you're responding to is not advocating that ideas are the responsibility of the PM, nor are they saying the PM should be the overall decider.

They are saying the PM is responsible for collecting information from the customer and bringing that information to the team in an efficient manner so the team can make decisions based on that information.

If the PM brings incorrect or inadequate information, the resulting product will be poor because the team will have made its decisions on the basis of that poor information.

[nickforr]

How does the PM know better than devs about whether or not they’re bringing the right information and not inadvertently summarising something incorrectly that’s technically important? Gatekeepers are generally inefficient longer-term.

[arcbyte]

You're attributing gatekeeping to the wrong place here. The customer is the gate and the customer's unavailability is keeping the gate shut.

The PO reduces that inadvertent gatekeeping by being always available with customer insights so the devs don't twiddle their thumbs or worse, build thr wrong thing, because they were guessing what the customer wanted in the absence of actually talking to them.

The PO reduces gatekeeping because they are an always available customer.

[goldcd]

Yes - also there are many customers. PdO is a weighted amalgamation of them all.