Over at Agile Advice, you can find a very nice blog article from the perspective of a development manager. I can tell that much: at my former company the PM (same person as DM in this case) did not take the pressure from us devs, at the current company it seems wo work well. Maybe because of that one major difference … that the CTO is member of the dev team? 😉
I was pointed to the article by a friend who is currently plagued by the flu. Get well soon! 🙂
// Oliver