It seems like many companies do a poor job of separating product management from project management—I believe this is actively counter-productive and explains the issues engineers complain about.
On the one hand, we have "product" work. In an idea world, this consists of talking to users, understanding their individual problems, synthesizing this into higher-level problems for users to solve, helping design the solution and managing iterative feedback on all of these. This is real work and it's important work, at least if you care about consistently building products that actually help people!
On the other hand, we have "project" work: schedules, deadlines, tracking who does what, when... etc. This can be important depending on context, but it's as separate from "product" work as it is from engineering. It's also the most common vector for micromanagement, whether from actual managers, "stakeholders" or other roles.
"Product" considerations are certainly important for timelines and product managers are responsible for prioritizing which customer needs to address first, but exactly the same thing can be said of "engineering" considerations except engineers should prioritize which technical systems to build instead.
All of the complaints I've seen in this thread—and most complaints I've heard from engineers about "PMs"—sound like they're about project management, not product management. I imagine this is a symptom of some broader problem (unreasonable/arbitrary deadlines, micromanagement... etc), but conflating that with product management ends up making the product side of the work much harder and contributes to unnecessarily poor relationships between product management and engineering.
On the one hand, we have "product" work. In an idea world, this consists of talking to users, understanding their individual problems, synthesizing this into higher-level problems for users to solve, helping design the solution and managing iterative feedback on all of these. This is real work and it's important work, at least if you care about consistently building products that actually help people!
On the other hand, we have "project" work: schedules, deadlines, tracking who does what, when... etc. This can be important depending on context, but it's as separate from "product" work as it is from engineering. It's also the most common vector for micromanagement, whether from actual managers, "stakeholders" or other roles.
"Product" considerations are certainly important for timelines and product managers are responsible for prioritizing which customer needs to address first, but exactly the same thing can be said of "engineering" considerations except engineers should prioritize which technical systems to build instead.
All of the complaints I've seen in this thread—and most complaints I've heard from engineers about "PMs"—sound like they're about project management, not product management. I imagine this is a symptom of some broader problem (unreasonable/arbitrary deadlines, micromanagement... etc), but conflating that with product management ends up making the product side of the work much harder and contributes to unnecessarily poor relationships between product management and engineering.