[NearAP]

This mindset is also part of the reason why some products are atrociously bad. Developers build products with the latest tech, whizzes, bells and whistles and totally miss the 'actual' requirements and/or how their users use it. When bugs/issues are raised, dev complains that users aren't using the product the 'correct' way.

At the end of the day, whether you should have a Product Manager or not AND the number of PMs you should have will depend on various factors such as the product itself, team size, size of the company, type of company (B2B, B2C, etc). But saying that PMs are NEVER needed and Developers should just build is wrong. Someone has to wear the hat of a 'Product' person. Whether it's a separate person or the developer is dependent on the factors earlier listed.

My comment here [1] and the discussions for that post is a good example of this mindset of PMs are NEVER needed.

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975417

[idopmstuff]

I wish I could upvote this more. I feel like the people who say that all you need is engineers have worked either exclusively at devtools type startups, or they've only worked at unsuccessful startups but have convinced themselves that the reasons why had nothing to do with lack of people with PM skills.

If you work in pretty much any kind of B2B SaaS and don't have PMs (or someone doing the PM work - if you've got engineers who were formerly PMs who spend half their time managing the roadmap, you can't really claim you're only employing engineers), you're probably doomed.