Do PMs finally always give in to what the CEOs want?

Do anyone else think PMs aren't very good at the things they are supposed to do. It is evident from failing products across industry. Any views??

Grapevine is the place where i have heard so much about PM. I can understand what it is but what are the skills required to get into it . Coding Language or analytical or btech or MBA or what,? State it like you are telling it to a commerce grad. Thanks.

Product managers are a divisive bunch. Ask us what we do, and most of us puff our chests and babble about Steve Jobs, PMF and god-knows-what. The rest slouch and mumble something about writing JIRAs. Curious about how non-PM folks view us - both good and bad!

Let's face it. In some company (read mine) they are the gatekeepers of all things roadmap, obviousness, communication between engineers and business. While in some companies they are nothing but a left over thought acting no more than a typical Program Manager (Google and how Engineers have more say and power in roadmaps). What are your thoughts on your PM?

Note - I am a product manager too 4 out of 5 product managers will act all high and mighty of themselves, bragging their way as if they run everything going on in the company, flaunting their business degrees and being utterly disrespectful towards their team( dev design qa name it), Recently started going to office so the attitude I am seeing is very transparent and more visible (more with the higher experience folks) It makes me wanna leave this hyper inflated role, thinking of I will end up like them scares me, and you have to do is speak out jargons in meetings day in day out and have a English accent of Shashi Tharoor. Recently my manager told that this is a role where you have to very representable or very visible and act in floor as if you are the busiest person on earth and I seriously some PMs in company doing that, they walk so fast in floor as if they will fall off or would be better to have 4 legs.

I am reading very often that the craze around product management is too much and this career is not worth the hype. Adding on to that it has huge supply of PMs and many of PMs are underpaid. Is it true?

1. They are the most overpaid people in India. 2. They have no work life balance and they don't even know what it means. 3. They think they are the best at everything, but they can't do anything right. 4. They are always complaining about their job and how much they hate it. 5. They are never satisfied with their salary or benefits package. 6. They are always looking for new jobs because they think they deserve better than what they currently have. Would you like to add anything else here?

I'm always doubtful, even after doing rigorous customer validation and analyzing user data. Happy to learn from folks here.

When I say a big company, I mean $50B+ market cap. I think PMing at a smaller scale is much more intense in terms of work load. You are constantly doing a lot of 0-1/1-10/10-100. But what about 100++ companies/products? What does a PM at Gmail do? How do they fill up their day? I mean how many experiments can one perform? Is PMing at that scale majorly just project management? For PMs who moved from high growth startups to companies like PayPal, Google, Microsoft -- do you get bored?