Comment by Aurornis

> I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.

Me too, but surprisingly it happens more often at places with the most Product Managers.

My worst experience was at a company that tried to enforce a specific ratio of Product Managers and "Product Designers" to engineers. If you added up the designers, product, project, and program people the total was higher than the number of engineers.

It only made everything worse. Fighting your way through the Product Management bureaucracy while trying to avoid having one of the PMs view your input as a threat was a job in itself.

Great Product Managers are invaluable additions to a company. The modern version of Product Management has attracted a lot of people who thrive on bureaucracy and process. The proliferation of Product Management influencers has made it much worse.