[ghaff]

>PMs are not essential for B2B.

It depends how you want to split things up. You can almost certainly move PM duties into other roles. Product Marketing can (and often does) handle competitive analysis and pricing. Engineers can certainly spend a chunk of their time meeting with customers, talking with the field, etc. But it will take time away from engineering.

[sarchertech]

In my experience the overhead of adding the additional layer of indirection is almost never worth it. Engineers have to spend nearly as much time meeting with product as they would meeting directly with customers. And so much gets lost in translation that I would almost always meet directly with customers.

When I first started we had business analysts, subject matter experts, and customers that we talked to. Replacing those with PMs has not been beneficial from what I’ve seen.