It is vital to have someone close enough to the project that the team trusts them to see their honest opinions about progress and blockers, including non-bullshit pointing of tasks, who is the point person for communicating progress to management, and who is capable of producing reports that are technically bullshit in an is-this-quantifiable-this-way sense but actually do reflect reality usefully to managers. Someone who does that well is worth All The Money.

They're useless if you're giving management direct access to team planning & communication tools, of course.

In some places these are called Engineering Project Managers, in others they are Technical Program Managers. You may think they are worth All The Money but let me assure you they usually make far, far less than the developers :-)