[ath3nd]

I work in the medical field which is fairly heavily regulated as well. My teams have been able to do our job without having a dedicated medical compliance expert as their PM.

We just have a medical compliance team and ask them for input, but they most certainly don't tell us what to build nor drive the product direction.

In short, I question the need of a PM, not the need for domain experts (law,financials,etc).

[mike_hearn]

If you've had good results without a PM you probably had someone who was doing that work, but under a different job title. Or the results weren't as good as you thought.

Good PMs are often engineers or ex-engineers themselves. But a good PM will do a much better job than just sticking a bunch of engineers in a room and asking them to manage the product. A lot of developers really hate tasks like:

- Designing UIs

- Thinking through complex workflows to simplify them (unless they're developer workflows)

- Writing documentation

- Often also, identifying and fixing small quality issues like bad error messages

- Figuring out what the customer's actually need vs what they say they need

Some devs are naturally talented and capable of doing all the above, plus banging out the code too. That's great, maybe they don't need a PM or more likely maybe they will become one themselves in future. But left to their own devices a lot of dev teams will rapidly lose the plot and start producing features nobody cares about, or doing endless refactorings, or produce something that's too hard to use.

[Feathercrown]

I kinda like doing those things