Which would be pretty much full circle at that point. When I started out, it was common for developers to do "product management", there wasn't a specialised role for it yet. You had developers and maybe project managers (generally also developers) and testers, and that was about it. Management would talk to developers about their strategy and problems, and they'd figure out what to build based on that.

I'm pretty weirded out by some "modern" teams where you have product managers spoon feed specifications to developers, and developers focusing on nothing but the code they need to write to do exactly as they've been told.

Product managers are in a weird place. They wear a ton of hats and do entirely different jobs based on where they work. They're often really valuable, but I have some trouble putting my finger on what makes a good one. If they're good at whatever it is they end up doing, that's good.

> If they're good at whatever it is they end up doing, that's good.

As a former PM (now an engineer), I think that's pretty much it. Teams and companies will vary a lot in terms of what they want the PM's to do, with some common patterns emerging, but as long as the PM's do the work well then the team is much better off. The key issue is how much you can trust the PM to hold up their end of the project.

A common theme I've noticed among good PM's: good judgement. When the team can trust the PM's judgement, the whole team flows better. When the team can't trust the PM's judgement, the PM is worth negative bandwidth.