It doesnt mean they are bad PM or good PM, innovation requires just fundamentally opposed skills to the standard product management ones that we see in books.
This is a bit like encountering an engineer who isn’t very good (or maybe it’s just a lack of experience) and then concluding that the engineering org should not be allowed to control architecture based on that experience.
Or encountering a dev team who goes off and builds some complex feature that no one asked for and then concluding that dev teams should never have a say in what should be built.
The existence of bad PMs or bad devs (or good PMs/devs executing a misguided plan) shouldn’t be used to justify a a general sweeping argument about either discipline.
Trust me, we deal with so much psuedo-emotional garbage every day that stuff like this just slides off our backs.
My point is that you obviously don't actually understand what a PM's job is, so you probably shouldn't be telling everyone what they can and cannot do.
As a PM I've been the one that's lead some of the largest and most successful innovation focused initiatives that the companies I've worked at have ever delivered. In some cased delivering revenue uplifts totaling 20-30% of the companies entire income.
Engineers don't have a monopoly on innovation. Innovation is what happens when a great solution is paired with a nasty problem. For at least one half of that calculus, most companies need good PM's.
This kind of apologizing for horrific behavior undermines what I thought were otherwise strong points.
Should PM's be better at not steam rolling engineering teams? Yeah, 100%, it's literally the #1 thing that I consciously work on when it comes to personal development and self discipline etc.
But it would also help if engineering teams were more... I want to say "aggressive" when it comes to solving new problems and building new solutions.
I get that "new features" is seen as a PM thing and we always get shit for pushing "new features" over things like fixing tech-debt. But for 95% of products, "new features" are going to be a very consistent reality and often they're responded to extremely negatively by engineering teams, even (and some times especially) when those engineering teams are placed in the drivers seat to come up with the solutions.
Given you don't understand that the core pillar of the product manager role is to be the owner of the problem space, I'm not sure how qualified you are to comment on how valuable our role is or isn't.
Discovery isn't about decided what does or doesn't get built, it's about discovering what the real problem is that your customers need solved (almost like it's in the name).
If your PM is good at their job, the answer to that question should be pretty clear once they're done. That's not them "telling you what to do", if you want to go build a solution to a problem nobody actually has, you have fun with that.
And if you PM is defining solutions and telling your team how/what to build, that's on you to push back and take ownership of the part of the process that you're meant to be owning.
A lot of PM's end up overreaching because they're just tired of there being a leadership vacuum and nobody willing to fill it. Trust me, we're busy enough, we don't want the extra work.