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I'm sorry but everything you just described is not a PM's job. The PM does NOT represent the customer. The PM is responsible for delivering an agreed upon set of functionality within time and budget.

You're describing a product owner.

edit: typo

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Program Managers are not Project Managers nor Product Managers. We perform the roles of one or both depending on the Org (which is kind of annoying that that isn't more predictable). Our primary role is customer advocate. You can see Steven Sinofsky's blog post from 2005 [1] about it. Ignoring what Sinofsky has or hasn't done, it's a very good post and fits what I try to do with my very open ended position. There is an article "Zen of PM" [2] that is a more recent description that I like a lot as well. You'll notice they disagree with each other a bit. :) It's never boring as a PM at Microsoft. If you're ever in a lull on a project, you can always pontificate about your reason for existing in the company.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.a... [2] http://microsoftjobsblog.com/zen-of-pm/

Are you not confusing the typical PM acronym (project manager) with the Microsoft PM acronym (program manager)? Most of the PM's I know at Microsoft have product ownership roles.

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