My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a separate PM attached to it.

I've worked without a product manager before and it was not a pleasant experience.

Without a PM: I conducted customer interviews, wrote up product requirement docs (PRD), and iterated with design on the mocks. On top of that, I had to implement the whole feature (while tweaking things with a designer), and also juggling another track of technical work.

This would be fine if I was a founding engineer, but I'm not and wasn't being compensated enough for the extra workload. And sure, now with LLMs the coding portion would be smaller, but there would still a lot of context switching and one might not able to do technical deep dives into things with all the meetings. All those meetings.

So don't overlook your PM.

So… I can do it all. Product manage, code, lead a team, even be my own designer in a pinch.

But that’s far too much work and context switching for one person. Someone will try, but the reason you tend to build teams of specialists is to let people focus even when they can do lots of different things.

> With clear quarterly goals

This requires a quality of product/program management and upper management buy-in that is rare in my experience.

The dynamic I've experienced is upper management giving the same incompetent teams projects over and over, having month after month of meetings with no deliveries and no real progress on the deliverable, and then eventually having to scramble and find someone else who can actually accomplish their goals.

Either that or so many things are broken that there's no possible way to prioritize beyond a few weeks because you can't let attention dip from any one spinning plate for too long or it'll fall.

My hotter take: All 3 of the engineer, PM and designer will all assume the other 2 are optional, in reality all 3 and the entire company they work for will be optional in most cases.

Agreed though I'm biased.

It will be interesting as orgs flatten to see what will keep all the remaining "superhuman AI-powered all-in-one" employees from just making their own shop.

I totally agree (as a PM of ~10 years).

I think that all PMs will need to get onto the engineering, design, or research ladder. We are already seeing companies eliminate the function here and there and I expect the trend to continue.

As a developer, I don't see the PM as a boss or planner. It's the guy that handles the communication with all the people that don't understand what I say and ensures that they don't annoy me.

A PM is not optional when you want to have developers that have time to code and don't get distracted by thirty people that all want something else and all ASAP.