In my experience as an engineer, and also as a founder, good PMs are extraordinarily valuable. Having lead engineering teams and also started a company, I can s

In my experience as an engineer, and also as a founder, good PMs are extraordinarily valuable. Having lead engineering teams and also started a company, I can safely say that prioritizing feature development is one of the hardest and most important things that needs to happen, and it never stops, it needs constant attention. A PM is a liaison between multiple teams - executive, sales, marketing, design, engineering, testing, QA, and last but not least, customers. They are responsible for wrangling the priorities and the schedule, and doing that is a full time job, often in larger companies of many people, not just one. There’s a lot of assumption built into the framing of your question. Why do you think a PM is a middleman and only creating meetings? Is this based on some experience? Why is your premise that the business team owns the roadmap? Bad PMs do exist, just like bad managers, and just like bad engineers. If that’s where your question is coming from, I’m sorry, but please don’t assume that a bad experience is universal; it’s not. In a business, there usually needs to be a healthy tension between what sales and marketing ask for, what the executive leadership see in the future, what customers need (which is not always what sales and marketing are asking for), what is on the engineering backlog, how difficult features are to implement (both how long, and also how disruptive they are), and anything the product needs that is not on one of those previous lists. When one team or one point of view dominates, bad things tend to happen. If sales and marketing gets to dictate what happens and engineering is relegated to implementing whatever they say, the roadmap can be too short-term and full of churn, it will lack focus and forget about existing customers. If engineering has complete control over the roadmap, it sometimes drifts away from what customers need and toward what engineers like to do, with solutions that are neat but overly complicated or using new technology for the sake of learning. You need a little of each, as well as some pushback from every direction to keep everyone happy. A PM has their work cut out for them.