Good PM, Bad PM is a classic by Horowitz. However, it was written in 1997 and says that “the PM is the CEO of the Product“. Which as many would argue is not true. There is such a love hate relationship between engineers and PMs. How would you define your ideal PM?? [PM= Product Manager] [link to the old artice= https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/]
... Shut the hell up
As a PM, the key is to communicate up and down the food chain. Setting expectations for cost, timeline and features to management and stakeholders - but also for the engineering so everyone knows the priority. Extremely important that if anything changes, those changes are propagated across everyone.
A good PM is someone who’s comfortable to not really own anything/anyone and yet is still motivated to come to work everyday.
Good PM is the one who left corp, started his own company, and proven to world that his vision and business model works. Bad PM is sitting on his ass, reading reddit, flaming on blind, and complains how world is unfair.
They are all just overhead
An ideal PM is actually an oxymoron, at least in enterprise software. Since last 5+ years, I have worked with one good PM, who did not have/want a PM title. His product sense and design were extraordinary. Thats it. One person. Founders are probably close to what an ideal PM is like. But by the time, they hire a PM, PM is already not an ideal PM anymore. They are hired to execute founder's vision, ideas and requests. The above person I mentioned is a founder.
Cisco your comments make me think you think too highly of yourself. To judge one PM as better than the others you are implicitly implying that you were somehow more capable than all of those people to really be able to evaluate them so. Which is also the problem with this world. Hmm.
A good PM is able to temper the expectations of the higher ups in the organization into something reasonable
A good PM is able to adjust when something ends up being more involved than previously expected
A good PM is able to split projects into reasonable assignments