[rogerclark]

At Apple, we had Project Managers (for instance "Engineering Project Managers" or EPMs). These PMs were not our bosses, and functioned as our peers in the organizations. They had a well-defined role: to facilitate the project being completed and to manage the dependencies with other teams and projects. Apple PMs do this through a combination of meetings, Radar (issue tracking), and interfacing with ICs and their managers.

This is different from the "Product Manager" at other companies which typically "owns" a product's direction and has authority over the people building it. That mixes project management with people management, politics, and worst of all, ego.

I never worked with an EPM at Apple that caused interpersonal problems. They all just wanted to fix bugs, figure out what we could and couldn't do in a specific timeframe, and release products on schedule. IMO, this is one aspect of Apple's organizational process that other companies should emulate, but I've never encountered it anywhere else. Maybe this kind of thing can only work at large companies that can afford to hire people for such a well-defined role.

[Nathanba]

but that's how it's officially supposed to be in other companies as well and it never works out that way. The PM sits at the middle of customers, leadership and implementation and the leadership then continually talks to the PMs and tells them what they want and the PM relays it and so inevitably the PM becomes a sort of artificial authority figure even though it is supposed to be a flat hierarchy. And of course a professional, informal relationship develops between PM and leadership because they talk all the time and so if you ever dared to ask leadership directly for whether this is really what they want, they'll back up the PM.