Product management, unless I'm woefully mistaken, is about temporarily inhabiting the cognitive framework of someone else in order to understand the ways in which they move through their world.

This sounds a lot to me like what anthropologists do. Granted, I don't personally know any anthropologists, but I have read accounts from anthropologists and it appears that this is the goal.

For instance, in Laboratory Life Bruno Latour embeds himself into a biological laboratory, the Salk Institute, to gain an understanding into how the scientists do what they do, namely discover new knowledge. Latour talks about their habits, their language, their movements, their systems, their politics in the same manner that the (perhaps prototypical) anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss discusses the particularities of indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

I'm working on a project currently thinking about how to extract intuitions and gut feeling from scientists in their work. Ultimately, this process is a mix of experiment, theory, empirical observation, and empathy. It's product management as anthropology. The only way to truly understand how people think is to place yourself fundamentally into the rhythms and rituals of the people themselves.

The best technologists, then, might be those who are the most interested in how humans organize themselves with each other and within their environment. I hope that's true.