It’s a little snarky and cynical but I’ve found little use for product managers in infra and devx teams because they typically don’t have the technical background to have relevant product vision and anyone that can make L7+ as an engineer on this sort of team should be able to figure out what the product should be.

This is different in a product team because engineers aren’t the customers, although I’d still argue anyone senior in a product engineering team should still have at least some product sense.

> Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking in a more typical team?

Good PMs do exactly this in product teams yes. But unfortunately PMs are not immune to shifting priorities and moving around either, just like I describe for engineers. So it's very hard to make it work but the best PMs I know somehow manage anyway!