My comments pertain to Enterprise products, and less towards consumer products. I have worked on consumer products intermittently and have found Product Manager

My comments pertain to Enterprise products, and less towards consumer products. I have worked on consumer products intermittently and have found Product Managers even less valuable there. Product Managers are useful but they should not work directly with engineers. Engineering Managers should be the people who work with PMs. PMs talking directly to engineers is a recipe for scope creep, complete requirements misses, and worse, misallocation of valuable engineering time on what could be "trivial" enhancements or features (from the PM's perspective). The best Product Managers work as a team with Engineering Managers. Overall, as an Engineer, I think Product Managers are 90% fluff. They are often not very knowledgeable about the industry, and they often do not have enough clout or political capital to tell upper management when they are on a wild goose chase. As a result they are often enablers of poorly-defined and consequently, poorly thought out products that are a nightmare to maintain and support that are not something the customer asked for. As they often come from nontechnical backgrounds, e.g., sales, or they are 'lapsed' engineers, they are not plugged into the actual product development dynamics in the team, but are often de-facto project managers owing to their position as go-betweens between sales, upper management and engineering teams. That is another black spot on their reputations with Engineers, who generally dislike Project Managers whether they are the PMP types or de-facto ones.