I'd like to make a wild inference and suggest that you and the parent poster are talking straight past each other, because you're drawing your experience from two different business paradigms.

kbmunchkin wrote:

> The lead developer handled communication with the IT Director about project status

The fact that the ultimate person being reported to was the head of IT strongly implies to me that it was an in-house development team working on in-house projects.

Your list,

> orchestrating people across sales, strategy, business transformation, creative, development, QA, operations and infrastructure.

Strongly implies that your experience comes from building consumer products.

Personally, I've spent time working on both successful and unsuccessful projects on both sides of the fence. What I've seen is that the most straightforward way to create a dysfunctional team is to try to take what works from one context, and apply it uncritically to the other. I personally hate working with a dedicated product manager on an in-house project every bit as much as I hate working without a dedicated product manager on consumer-facing stuff.