Until recently, I shared your sentiment about product managers, but recent experience has refined my point of view.

IMO a good product manager does not focus on trying to understand _why_ things are hard, but rather _what_ things are hard.

With this understanding they can either 1) work to change scope/requirements so that the bigggest user pain points are solved ASAP or 2) accept that more time than anticipated is required to solve user problems.

Implicit in all of this is the trust that when engineers say something is hard, it is actually hard.

When I see the author talking about paranoia, trust is the first thing that comes to mind.

To be fair, I don’t think that trust is easy. But I also don’t think that effective product management is possible without it