As a PM I'm curious what type of work that falls into this category. Also curious if this was specifically coming from the PM or if it was coming from above.
It usually came from sales and other teams. The big difference that I saw is that in the past to give an engineering team work from another team meant that the other team's TL had to convince the TL of the team to take the work, and the TL had enough context to push back (which I believe is the best thing to do in most of the cases).
In the old Google PMs were working on promoting the work of engineering teams and communicating with sales/ops, but didn't have a strong power over the direction of the work of the engineering teams. Their time was a scarce resource to be used by the team, not extra bosses. In the new Google, PMs have a lot of time that they are using for fighting with each other to have some feature implemented that they are pushing.
Also the best PMs in the old Google had some engineering background, and were doing log analysis without asking help from the engineers for every question.
