[physicsguy]

I've recently left a job because of bad product management. The big issue I find is that often PMs are too far away from the product and spending all their time politicking and thinking about "strategy", so they have no idea how much work a particular feature is. I was leading a technical team in my last job working on industrial software, and I'd regularly have a PM come to me and tell me that there's been a contract signed for a new customer, and we have X piece of bespoke work as part of that contract due by usually ~1 month in the future. So you start asking questions, what does X mean, how do you want to resolve this problem, etc. etc. etc. and most of the time, the PM can't answer those questions, so you're stuck. And the deadline gets closer and closer, and then the customer isn't happy when it inevitably gets missed, and the pressure comes down on you as an engineer to make things work, and people get burnt out.

My view is that PMs should sit super super close to the team. There should never be a case where the software team is more knowledgeable about the product function than the PM, but in practice this is often the case.