“In great teams, the product is everyone’s responsibility—titles don’t build value, ownership does.” — Melissa Perri
The Product Manager Is Dead. Long Live the Product!”
In the bustling open offices of the early 2010s, amidst kanban boards and daily standups, a new archetype had fully cemented itself in the software world: the Product Manager (PM). Hailed as the “CEO of the product,” this role promised to be the connective tissue between engineering, design, marketing, and sales. PMs were expected to synthesize customer needs, business strategy, and technical constraints into a unified roadmap, ushering teams toward user-centric success.
But something has shifted.
As modern product organizations mature—and as agile thinking continues to evolve—a growing movement has emerged: building high-functioning product teams without dedicated product managers. This is not merely a cost-cutting measure or a return to engineering-led myopia. It’s a deliberate restructuring that redistributes accountability, increases autonomy, and places a higher premium on collaboration and domain expertise.
Let’s explore how we got here, who’s leading the way, and what these PM-less teams look like in action.
A Brief History of Product Management
The modern PM role traces its roots back to Procter & Gamble in the 1930s with Neil McElroy’s famous memo defining the role of a “brand man.” In tech, it was reborn at Hewlett-Packard, then refined at Microsoft in the ’80s and ’90s, and revolutionized at Google in the 2000s.
For years, product managers thrived as generalists. They weren’t coders or designers, but they asked good questions, framed business problems, and turned ambiguity into execution. They wrote PRDs, ran sprints, spoke with users, and translated between business and technical worlds.
But as cross-functional teams matured, so did the disciplines within them. Designers started conducting their own user research. Engineers spoke directly with customers. Marketing brought data into the loop. And over time, the “translator” model began to feel like a bottleneck.
The Thought Leaders Rewriting the Playbook
This isn’t an anarchic movement. It’s led by seasoned veterans who have seen the downsides of traditional PM-heavy models.
- Marty Cagan, author of Inspired, long championed strong product teams where product managers are empowered, not bureaucratic. Interestingly, his vision of PMs as product leaders, not backlog managers, inadvertently highlighted just how often companies were doing it wrong.
- Basecamp (now 37signals) famously eschewed traditional PMs, favoring “shaped” work, where product thinking is shared across leadership and teams. Their Shape Up methodology replaces traditional roadmaps with “bets” and cycles instead of sprints.
- David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried of 37signals argue that the best products emerge when engineers, designers, and leaders co-own the product vision and execution.
- Stripe, Figma, and GitHub have experimented with engineer- or designer-led product teams, especially in early-stage or technically deep areas. These companies found success in deeply embedding product responsibilities into the core team, not a liaison.
What a PM-less Org Looks Like
A high-functioning org without PMs doesn’t lack product thinking—it distributes it. Here’s how roles shift:
1. Engineers Own Execution and Roadmapping
Engineers don’t just receive tickets—they define what to build and why. This requires hiring engineers who are not just technically excellent but also product curious. They attend user interviews, challenge assumptions, and contribute ideas. Senior engineers in these orgs often act as product leads in practice.
2. Designers Drive Research and Experience Strategy
UX designers don’t just make things pretty—they understand user problems deeply. In PM-less setups, they often own discovery, journey mapping, and prototype validation. This mirrors the dual-track agile model, where discovery and delivery happen in tandem, not sequentially.
3. Leadership Sets Vision, Not Features
Executives and founders articulate clear outcomes, guardrails, and constraints—but not a laundry list of features. They define problems to solve, not solutions to implement. This aligns with the OKR model, where teams self-organize around key results.
4. Project Managers Keep the Trains Running
It’s important to distinguish project management from product management. Without PMs, there’s often a dedicated delivery manager or scrum master ensuring timelines, dependencies, and cross-team alignment.
What Good Looks Like
At Figma, teams often run lean and PM-less, especially in new or experimental areas. Engineers and designers jointly define the problem space. Leadership provides broad thematic direction. The result? Lightning-fast iteration, deeply aligned teams, and incredibly user-focused output.
37signals’ Shape Up cycles provide six-week build periods with clear shaping beforehand. Teams are autonomous, expectations are well-defined, and there’s no backlog hell. Instead of endless grooming, teams make discrete bets and ship or kill.
These models work because they are intentional. They are not anti-product—they are post-product-manager in the traditional sense.
What Bad Looks Like
Removing PMs without replacing their functions is a recipe for disaster. Consider teams where:
- No one talks to customers.
- Engineers are overwhelmed with coordination.
- Leadership dictates feature requests with no context.
- Designers are siloed without influence on strategy.
In these cases, the absence of PMs creates a vacuum. Confusion, missed timelines, lack of prioritization, and incoherent strategy quickly follow.
Ceremonies, Rituals, and Cadences
A PM-less team thrives on clarity and rhythm. Typical practices include:
- Weekly Planning Sessions led by tech leads and designers together.
- Discovery Interviews run by designers or engineers.
- Engineering/Design Pairing sessions to tighten feedback loops.
- Demo Fridays where all work is shown, not just shipped.
- Decision Docs and lightweight RFCs to ensure alignment across time zones.
The absence of a PM makes clear documentation and asynchronous context-sharing essential.
Leadership in a PM-less World
Leaders play a vital role in this model:
- Define the “Why” and the Outcome.
Instead of directing features, leadership aligns teams on problems worth solving. - Invest in Talent.
Teams need product-savvy engineers and designers. Hiring and development strategies must reflect this. - Protect Focus.
Without a PM to say “no,” leaders must enforce prioritization and shield teams from noise.
Is This Model Right for Everyone?
No.
This model shines in:
- Startups or technical products where engineers are close to users.
- Design-led organizations with strong UX maturity.
- High-trust, low-politics cultures with direct communication.
But in larger, siloed, or less mature organizations, removing PMs without a strong framework can lead to chaos. The model requires teams to be both highly capable and aligned with the broader company mission.
Wrapping up…
The move away from product managers doesn’t mean the end of product thinking—it’s a redistribution of responsibility. In some orgs, this creates magic. In others, mayhem.
Whether you have PMs or not, what matters is ensuring someone owns:
- The customer problem.
- The prioritization of work.
- The success metrics.
- The glue between design, engineering, and the business.
If that’s happening—regardless of title—you’re doing product right.
