Should a technology company maintain a separate product management function alongside engineering?

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023 · hedged

AI will give rise to a 'product architect' role that merges product, design and engineering into one discipline, using AI as leverage to ship new products faster

Scope: framed as his sense of where things go

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Cem Kansu · Jun 20, 2025 · hedged

The roles of engineer, product manager and designer will converge substantially — each becoming capable of doing much of the others' work — though probably not fully merge

AI tools let PMs design and vibe code, designers stretch into engineering, and engineers into design

Scope: not full convergence; already happening today

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Anton Osika · Aug 18, 2025

AI has collapsed the early steps of the product life cycle — idea, mock-up, internal and user validation — into minutes or hours, and the remaining later steps should be absorbed into one tool so you no longer need separate product, design and engineering organizations

Writing code was only one part of the life cycle; Lovable has matured on everything up to validated shipping, so the rest must be built out as fast as possible so anyone with the best ideas spends the most time building

Scope: the later steps are still to be built

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Adam Foroughi · Apr 27, 2026

Over time most companies should not have a separate product function: either product people become engineers or engineers become product people, but you don't need both

At AppLovin engineers write the product that delivers revenue and every other team effectively supports them; exceptional engineers should understand the product well enough to build it, and whoever becomes AI-native becomes the 10x-100x output person

61:39 Merge product into engineering no separate function

Fernando Fanton · Jul 27, 2025

Team composition should be dictated by the problem being solved rather than a fixed ratio of engineers to PMs to designers

Sometimes only engineers are needed, sometimes only data people; if requiring everyone to code adds value to the solution you don't need PMs, and PMs make sense precisely because they relieve you of the constraint that everyone must ship production code

15:20 Team composition should match the problem not a fixed role ratio

Aatish Nayak · Apr 11, 2025

Companies should minimize the distance between the customer need and the code written, because every organizational layer between customer and engineer strips out nuance.

Information transfer between humans is lossy — you can't relay a customer's full context, emotion, and enunciation — so PMs, salespeople, founders, and designers in the chain degrade the signal; the fix is putting engineers directly in front of customers, even flying them to labeling centers to observe and prototype on-site.

9:12 Minimize organizational layers between customer and engineer to preserve signal fidelity