[jasontheknight]

The general pattern of replies from developers to any thread like this tends to go "I worked at a company and the PM was bad so therefore all PMs are bad and pointless". And, let's be clear, there are lots of undertrained, underskilled PMs out there working on the wrong things (delivery management, writing tickets, bossing devs around etc).

BUT - this is a leadership problem. Either leadership want and expects PMs to be doing those things (dysfunctional product mindset) or they want them to be better PMs but don't know how (poor performance management). In either case, firing all the PMs and expecting the devs to do it just means the devs get thrown into the fire instead. They're welcome to try! But, the idea that removing PMs from a dysfunctional organisation fixes anything is nonsensical. The devs will be just as unhappy taking orders from a more senior stakeholder who understands them even less.

Good product managers can be game changers. They absolutely should not spend all their time bossing developers around. They don't need to be former developers themselves (although there's nothing wrong with developers becoming PMs). They don't need to spend all their time on tech. Building great products isn't as simple as saying "The developers can do it" and letting them build whatever. How many developers really want to work on market strategy, pricing and packaging, customer segmentation, user interviews, wrangling stakeholders etc? I guess... maybe some... but enough? The whole fetish that developers have for "just let us do it" will dissolve quickly in a good or bad organisation because they only see the bits they want to see.

For the record, I spent 20 years as a developer before moving into product leadership.