Apparently no management ever wants to be paid less than their employees.
Even though producers are in a management-like role, they are generally considered on the same tier as other workers (engineers, designers, artists). Their pay grade skews lower than engineering, higher than art and design.
There are still highly-paid product leads and corporate officers all over gaming. But, I wonder if something like the producer role is present elsewhere in the software industry (I've only worked in gaming). Or, if it should be...
That's a project manager, as opposed to like, 'people managers.' PMs are the unfortunate dotted line in org charts, with zero power but massive responsibilities -- shipping on time and under budget!
Paying them more money (in the form of a higher fixed salary) gives them less skin in the game; skin in the game is what is value at risk; because of declining marginal utility, the more is given unconditionally, the less is at risk, ceteris paribus.
Of course, if we are talking about earning massive bonuses from hidden/delayed risks, that’s a different matter.
B) there's a few ways for this to be only technically true: i. salary versus equity compensation can be different yet still higher ii. 'often' can mean a variety of different things, such as 'occurring more times than I can count on my hands', rather than say 'more than 50 percent of managers'.