Who "exploits and manipulates" developers? If the answer is their dev manager/lead, good, that's their "job" (being sarcastic here); but yeah, I expect from my

Who "exploits and manipulates" developers? If the answer is their dev manager/lead, good, that's their "job" (being sarcastic here); but yeah, I expect from my boss to give me some direction when needed. However, I think you are pointing out that devs get "exploited and manipulated" by, surprise, other PMs. I really can't think of someone else that is good at this. So yeah, just remove PMs that are specialized in "politics". Now, if you remove "politics" PMs then you could argue that customer support, cross-team requests, etc. will impact developers. In this case, dev managers/leads should prioritize those requests and it should be painful to take away dev time to serve other tasks. If it's painful you will probably invest time in fixing the customer support issue rather than managing your customers. If you are spending too much time serving marketing requests, maybe you just have a bad product that needs improvements before it gets shipped, etc. I really don't believe easing politics is the way to go.