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Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs.I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders.
> Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.
Great, but ten different clients want ten different product requirements, that in fact contradict each other. And it takes ten hours of calls to talk to those ten customers.
Plenty of engineers could certainly do the PM job. Many PM's come from engineering. But the point is that it's far more efficient and effective to have one person doing that, and let engineers do the engineering. That's the value. As an engineer, do you want to spend 20 hours every week talking to customers and writing feature specifications and managing a backlog? Or do you want to do, you know, engineering?
Just because you could do the PM job doesn't mean that's an efficient use of your time, or what you enjoy doing.