I've seen two types of PMs: - micromanagers of tasks and features - insightful data munchers The first group is usually a bunch of people citing Marty Cagan,

I've seen two types of PMs: - micromanagers of tasks and features - insightful data munchers The first group is usually a bunch of people citing Marty Cagan, talking about continuous discovery and running in circles. They are not helpful and sometimes hurtful to performance. The second group captures business and market data, process it and create insights from it. They keep the engineering effort focused. Those are very helpful. This is just my personal experience, of course, but I'm yet to see a third type. EDIT: to be fair, Marty's books seem to advocate for the second type.