> Anyone can be an "ideas guy".

I disagree with this. I've worked with amazing "ideas guys" who just cranked out customer insights and interesting concepts, and I've worked with lousy ones, who just kinda meandered and never had a focused vision beyond a milquetoast copy of the last thing they saw. There's a real skill to forming good concepts, and it's not a skill everyone has!

I do agree that having good ideas is a skill in its own right. But people with bad ideas are idea guys too! You see them all the time in the indie game development scene in particular. "I need a programmer, and an artist, and a composer, to build this amazing idea for me!", together with an 8 paragraph wall of text (the paragraphs are if you're lucky) describing the idea, and as you'd expect from somebody who couldn't be bothered to develop a single skill, their game ideas are exactly as good as their programming, art, and music.

I find that the strength of people's ideas tends to be highly correlated with their overall skills. I don't know that you can develop the capability for good ideas without getting your hands dirty learning a field, experimenting, absorbing all kinds of information and understanding what really goes into the making of a good idea. In that way, the person with good ideas always ends up being more than just a ideas guy. They don't just have good ideas, they have good ideas and the skills to back them up. Whereas the "ideas guy" label is usually applied to people who have nothing to bring to the table other than their ideas, and wouldn't you know it, they aren't nearly as good as they think they are.

I think the Product Manager title was (and still is) one of the most abused titles in tech. A great product manager is indispensable for setting product direction in a way that can't be accomplished by others doing it part-time or advocating for their own needs. I've worked with some truly great product managers.

I've also worked with a lot of awful product managers. The product manager title is squishy enough that it gets assigned to people with charisma or confidence without actual skills to follow through. A bad product manager can blend in to a company for years by relaying ideas around from one group to another and having ChatGPT write documents. The engineers on the ground see the incompetence long before it becomes undeniable at the higher ranks.

When I read Hacker News and other sites I suspect a lot of engineers have only ever worked with bad PMs from the latter category.

Anyone can be an "ideas guy" because there's no failure event that stops you. Contrast this with being a plumber. Not anyone can be a plumber.