[phillipcarter]

As a PM I've always held the opinion that I'm genuinely not needed for a ton of work if the lead engineer is reasonably product-minded and understands current customers. Most existing customer pains are plainly evident and so long as it's not a wild amount of work, my job is to just give a thumbs up and move on.

Where it gets nasty is the new opportunities. Assuming your system of patronage at a company is a good one, there's a lot of work in finding new opportunities in the first place and testing them out. And often the cat herding of developers who do some of this (great!) but want to just run wild without testing any of their assumptions (not so great!) and trying to balance the excitement and creative forces with whatever framing is needed to satisfy others in the company. That gets most complicated when various stakeholders hold opposing positions on "what we should be focused on", and if you don't have a PM absorbing that damage for you, you're just going to end up doing that all day instead of building software.