Why Are Product Managers Necessary?
Lean startups ship without dedicated PMs. Enterprise often cannot. Is that wisdom, or process with a job title?
Many successful startups ship without dedicated product managers. Large enterprises rarely do. That gap is usually explained as "scale." Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is just process nobody questioned.
After joining a bigger company, I kept seeing the same pattern on backend systems: product managers who had owned an API surface for years still could not reliably estimate how long a change would take, what it required technically, or what it would do to clients.
The coordination tax
In those cases the PM role did not reduce engineering load. Engineers and EMs spent meetings helping draft design docs that were not even final. Ambiguity moved around the org chart instead of getting resolved.
A product manager is valuable when they shrink uncertainty and protect focus. They are costly when they become another layer between the people building the software and the people using it.
Ownership beats handoffs
Some engineers want a ticket and a spec. Fine. The teams that move fastest tend to have engineers who understand why something is being built, not only what to implement.
That does not mean every engineer must become a strategist. It means lean orgs win when engineers sit closer to users, propose the smallest useful version, and ship. Fewer handoffs. Fewer translation errors. Faster feedback.
Startups get this by necessity. Enterprises add PMs by convention. Sometimes that convention is wisdom. Sometimes it is bureaucracy.
What I take from it
If you are building a company, or trying to compete like a startup inside a larger one, teaching engineers to think in products often beats hiring another coordinator.
The best teams I have seen do not wait for perfect specs. They understand the goal, cut scope, and ship.