As someone very familiar with the PM process at Microsoft--I don't totally agree with the conclusion. PMs can be incredibly valuable to a team and are, in a dif

As someone very familiar with the PM process at Microsoft--I don't totally agree with the conclusion. PMs can be incredibly valuable to a team and are, in a different way, a creator/do-er. Unfortunately, most PMs construct obstacles and walls rather than bring focus and help a development team navigate their direction. Also, one thing I see a lot of PMs who follow the "minimalist" approach confuse is that the idea isn't really to remove features to strip the product down to it's bare capabilities in the name of minimalism or elegance (while not a bad exercise, can make certain types of differentiation challenging in a competitive space). Instead, it's about good design and delivering quality on the core user scenarios rather than allowing yourself to stray to "it'd be cool to do this" without fulling thinking through the needs of your users, the resulting user experience, and the dilution of effort on your dev and QA team by chasing those edge scenarios. It's that lack of focus and discipline that ultimately leads to features that need to be removed.