Seeing this division of PM:why, what, vs. EM:how, when, and who is vincidating, but in multiple organizations, I have never met an EM who did not want to be a P

Seeing this division of PM:why, what, vs. EM:how, when, and who is vincidating, but in multiple organizations, I have never met an EM who did not want to be a PM (n~=20), and this misalignment created friction. PM envy is a real thing. However, it's because of a lack of distance between the skills in the EM/PM pairing. The successful pairs I've seen, there was no threat to the skills of the other. A non-technical PM who is content to take the EM's technical views at face value and takes incoming flak on behalf of them, and an EM who recognizes the complexity of the multiparty dynamic of sales, board/investors, customers, and finance, and defers on those issues - together, these are very distant and so they work together in a complementary way. Obviously it's more nuanced, but the complementary difference was key. Where the PM is an architect with skills (my own conceit), and the EM thinks the tools they have for solving problems can also be applied to managing complex dynamics, the overlap is going to make bad neighbours. You need real complementary skill diversity, because if one thinks they are too similar, it's going to be a hyper-personalized war for their percieved security, and the whole thing goes bonkers. Negative team conflict is essentially "mimetic violence," to use the Girard/Danco framework. The best EMs I've seen loved the tech problems they were solving and really liked leveraging people to scale teams to solve them, and found that satisfying. IMO, an EM who doesn't get excited at how cool their stuff is is a liability. The best PMs I've seen both knew and genuinely liked their customers, albeit with benevolent boundaries. One guy I saw was like this happy monk who listened and relieved suffering with new features. Whatever the unicorn he's now at pays him is not nearly enough. They have an invisible, energizing effect. If you are in a PM/EM conflict, consider whether you think you can do the other person's job, and if you think you can, not only are you wrong, but you are likely at least half of the problem. However, the solution is to recognize the other person doing something you can't (not telling them, rather, admitting it to yourself and your unintentional behaviour will just change). IMO, there is no point in talking it through, the conflict is based on your internally held beliefs about how similar you are, and the only way to resolve it is to adapt those beliefs with new consideration. Mentally treating what they do as a kind of alien magic can create enough breathing room because that exercise of creating that conceptual distance is the opposite of holding territory and security. If you literally can do their jobs, you are a mismatched pair, and if you are an exec creating these pairings, consider reassigning pairs that are too close in skills and lack complimentary properties.