Sounds like you are doing good PO work, keep at it!

Glad to hear we're not the only ones with salespeople promising the moon and the stars to clients without asking first lol

Yes, it's fun when you make an estimate and planning for the lastest sale and it turned out the three weeks sold is three months of work. No, I don't care what you promised, it'll be ready in three months. Ask for an estimate before you make that promise next time.

In swoops the project team to sign a contract with a software vendor without any architectural or Product input, then expects you to implement changes for whatever the software does and however it works. They do not know.

I'm a PM in a different field (science stuff). If anyone asked me to present on behalf of the science team, I would say no. It's their work. Managing a team and timelines and budget does not mean I do the work. I think this is why when job searching I get a lot of interviews with dev and other tech. They just want competent managers. Some of them, anyway.

I'm not an architect, but I've sat in on architecture presentations and the most rewarding feedback I've seen is "Any objections? Ok, approved".

In my current project, we hold reviews together with our customer, because supposedly they work together with us on this project (they have done nothing of value since project start).

And it's so miserable, because among us colleagues, we really don't know what everyone else actually developed, because you obviously don't want to go into deep technical discussions, nor be too critical, when the customers all sit there.

In every dev job I've ever held it's been me or one of the other devs doing demos (usually me though). Granted I haven't worked on anything truly high profile that a demo would be An Event.

they rejected my request for raise because "you already are amongst the ones with highest percentage raise in the past"(which is in single digit, BTW). meanwhile peers who do nothing all day are more paid.

i'm not jealous. just feel like I'm underpaid and overworked

feels bad man

There are different audiences for demos though. It should be that way at the "working level". When you start moving up the chain with more senior leadership in your org, it starts to make more sense to have the PM do the demos/briefs.

Usually devs don't particularly care or want to and sometimes they aren't really qualified to--its not their skillset. But if it's a good PM, that's where they shine. That's the value they bring to the project. They (should) know the politics, landmines, things that specific leaders would care about (and to highlight for them), and how to frame it to current business needs. They have the context to understand when a seemingly innocuous question is actually pointed. They might not know the intricacies of your code, but they (should) know the intricacies of the organization. That's not something most developers know, and why should they? That's not their job.

Sometimes it even involves groundwork meetings and demos to make sure you have support from other key components in your org-- like getting your CTO excited because one of his performance goals was x and your project is the first real implementation of x. Now, you have the CTO ready to speak on your behalf in front of the CIO. As a PM you know that the CIO has been getting flack from the CFO because there hasn't been a good way to capture costs for Y, but your system starts the org down the path to fix that. Now they are both excited about the project and in your corner. Etc etc

How it is where I work. How it should be.

A product owner is not the same as a project manager.

Nobody's reading that code after launch. Certainly not customers.