With practice, you can identify a program manager in the wild.  This is a useful skill to have.

1. They have a BlackBerry¹in a belt holster.  They often use their BlackBerry while walking down the hall, which occasionally results in them walking into someone else or into the wall.  The former is annoying (especially when it’s you), the latter is entertaining.
2. Every PowerPoint presentation that they touch instantly uses the corporate template.  It doesn’t matter the audience, it doesn’t matter the topic.  Somehow, just by a deck passing through their hands, the corporate template is applied, as if by magic.  As a corollary, they’re appalled when someone doesn’t use the corporate template, even if it’s just a presentation for an internal team of four people.
3. They’re buzzword complaint in ways that mere mortals can’t dream of.  It’s no fun playing a game of buzzword bingo when during a PM’s presentation, because someone will win within the first five minutes².
4. Everything reduces to a feature set. User interface? Totally a feature. Bugs? Features in need of some love. Anything the customer says? Features-to-be. Anything that a competitor says? Features that aren’t nearly as good as our features.
5. They will never ever commit to anything. Deadline? Won’t commit. Feature list? Won’t commit. Timeframe for fixing something? Won’t commit.

I really don’t want to know what a PM would write about how to identify a researcher …