Do teams actually need PMs?

We say we regret product management exists. We articulate it that way to force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one. You hire one where there's really specific need. Wherever possible, it's optimal to not have a product manager. As tech companies scaled, somewhere along the line, this HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire 6 engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM. And so now all of a sudden you've got a lot of product managers. In most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure. Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works. Hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.