Without a PM: I conducted customer interviews, wrote up product requirement docs (PRD), and iterated with design on the mocks. On top of that, I had to implement the whole feature (while tweaking things with a designer), and also juggling another track of technical work.
This would be fine if I was a founding engineer, but I'm not and wasn't being compensated enough for the extra workload. And sure, now with LLMs the coding portion would be smaller, but there would still a lot of context switching and one might not able to do technical deep dives into things with all the meetings. All those meetings.
So don't overlook your PM.
A couple of things worth separating: strategic direction in most orgs is already handed down from the VP or exec level, the PM is usually executing on that mandate.
Now that coding agents exist, both the PM and the engineer end up prompting a coding agent. So, over time, the roles converge and product ownership just becomes part of building.
But that’s far too much work and context switching for one person. Someone will try, but the reason you tend to build teams of specialists is to let people focus even when they can do lots of different things.
* Not easy at all, but too bad. We worship at the altar of productivity and either you're our blood sacrifice or you're unemployed
Companies without any product managers, much less good ones, are putting out profitable products all the time.
This requires a quality of product/program management and upper management buy-in that is rare in my experience.
The dynamic I've experienced is upper management giving the same incompetent teams projects over and over, having month after month of meetings with no deliveries and no real progress on the deliverable, and then eventually having to scramble and find someone else who can actually accomplish their goals.
Either that or so many things are broken that there's no possible way to prioritize beyond a few weeks because you can't let attention dip from any one spinning plate for too long or it'll fall.
I think that all PMs will need to get onto the engineering, design, or research ladder. We are already seeing companies eliminate the function here and there and I expect the trend to continue.
One thing LLMs don't have is taste. That's on me.
It will be interesting as orgs flatten to see what will keep all the remaining "superhuman AI-powered all-in-one" employees from just making their own shop.
A PM is not optional when you want to have developers that have time to code and don't get distracted by thirty people that all want something else and all ASAP.