[ehnto]

Some might be thinking of a flat-hierarchy being a better fit for remote work, and certainly I think that's a step in the right direction but there are caveats there too.

You can end up with a distributed and diminished sense of ownership of the whole project, as people feel ownership of the parts they worked on but not other parts. To the point where really obvious problems, lets say a bug in the software, can linger or regress because no-one feels full ownership over that particular part of the project.

That being somewhat inevitable, you need an individual who has that full, holistic ownership who feels responsible for getting those orphaned problems fixed.

I think there is a huge value in a project manager who can effectively sit at the same level as developers, and work with them to organize and set priorities, and I've worked with a few like that and a few who prefer to elevate themselves and disconnect from the nuts-and-bolts of the work, and I can say we got more good work done with the former because we could more easily navigate complex problems in the product.

One particular PM I worked with marketed himself as a "Technical PM" and I think that's the right way to think about that role. If you wanted to demark the difference between a Technical PM and Lead Developer, I would say the technical PM has more of a stake in the end-user experience, and a lead dev has more of a stake in the technical competence of the build, but they both sit very close to the work itself and there's likely some overlap.