ElevenLabs intentionally never hired PMs. Instead, they optimize for engineers who also understand customers and design. AI tooling helps these individuals bridge skill gaps, allowing them to manage the entire product development cycle independently, eliminating the need for a traditional PM role.

To maintain a culture of 'doers', Applovin eliminated the product management function entirely. Engineers are expected to act as their own product managers, understanding the core business KPIs and ensuring their work directly drives revenue. This blurs traditional roles and accelerates value creation.

The V0 team operates with minimal product management oversight, empowering product-minded engineers (often ex-founders) to make 95% of product decisions directly. This sacrifices potentially "perfect" choices for a dramatic increase in development velocity.

Sundial founder Julie Zhu intentionally avoids hiring product managers. This constraint forces engineers to take full ownership of the product definition and user value, preventing them from delegating critical product thinking and developing a stronger sense of customer empathy.

The PM role is intentionally undefined, meant to adapt to a team's needs—from strategy to quality control. However, these functions can often be filled by a strong engineering lead or designer, making dedicated PMs non-essential, and potentially harmful, on smaller teams.

Evan Spiegel intentionally resisted hiring Product Managers in the early days to avoid a culture where designers merely create visuals from specs. By making designers do the PM work themselves, he ensured they owned product direction and strategy, establishing a strong, designer-led culture from the start.

The traditional model promotes top PMs away from hands-on work. Whatnot reverses this by having senior leaders, including the CPO, spend most of their time as individual contributors. This keeps the best 'players on the field,' leading to faster, higher-quality decisions and a stronger connection to the product.

Instead of hiring more PMs to manage faster engineering cycles, Anthropic focuses on hiring engineers with strong product taste who can ship end-to-end. This reduces overhead and blurs traditional roles, as most PMs and designers also have engineering backgrounds.

ElevenLabs eliminates the traditional Product Manager role. They hire "product engineers" who own the entire development loop from ideation to shipping and analysis. Growth leads (often ex-PMs) then partner with engineering leads on GTM and acquisition, creating a faster, more accountable structure.