Congratulations to the team. Knowing some of the folks on the Bun team I can not say I am surprised. They are the top 0,001% of engineers, writing code out of love. I’m hugely bullish on Anthropic, this is a great first acquisition.
I read: 'I had a bad experience with a product manager, so all are bad.'
I agree that there are tons of bad PMs out there. But allow me to summarize what a good PM does:
Talk to customers; either to dig deep into their use case, deescalate a situation, figure out solutions, or conduct research.
Monitor the rest of the market.
Plan launches, pricing, and coordinate with sales teams, etc. - I had Product Marketing staff before, but they missed context and delivered bad experiences. I find it way harder to find a good product marketing manager than a good product manager.
The PM is the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) and therefore takes a lot of shit. The PM acts as a filter so you can continue doing your job.
A good PM can even write a line of code here and there. Prototyping is part of the job.
Roadmap, strategy, vision, build vs. buy... often the center of friction between what the business wants, what customers want, what the business can afford, and what engineers want to build. Finding a middle ground.
You are right; these are not skills you learn in school. A PM wears a lot of hats. People with a solution architect or engineering background with a customer-facing element to their past tend to have the best chance of being a good PM. But by no means is the PM job an unnecessary one - do you want to figure out how to price a product and be responsible if sales can't sell it? I hope you come across a good PM in your career.
'Just hire great people' - what's new?
PS: The success of a PM highly depends on the engineering culture. If engineers are convinced all PMs are useless and they have no real job, or as a real-life example: engineer thinks A, PM shows data that shows B, but engineer just thinks the data is wrong and will do A anyway... it will be a highly frustrating collaboration for both. Please keep an open mind.