alt Hacker News> The product management side of this equation is equally unsettled. If developers are now thinking more about what to build and why, they are doing work that used to belong to product managers
It's not clear to me why this is true. If LLMs are writing code, why are developers simply not orchestrating the completion of more features instead of moving up the stack to do product development work? Is there some implication that the existence of LLMs also enables developers to run user studies, evaluate business metrics and decide on strategy?
Additionally, if PMs can use LLMs to increase velocity in their work why not focus on all the things that used to be deprioritized? Why, with the freed up time, is generating code the best outcome?
These questions likely have different answers depending on organization size but I'm not sure I understand why orgs wouldn't just do more work in this scenario instead of blending responsibilities. It's not like there's infinite mental bandwidth just because an LLM is generating the code
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PMs do different things in different organizations.
In my last job, PMs were responsible for identifying problems that were worth solving and align with the overall company vision and plans within the owned domain, and design+engineering decided how to solve those problems and what to build. Of course with collaboration w/ the PMs (and EMs).
The job before that, PMs wrote jira tickets and nagged engineering when tickets will be delivered. The "what problems to solve and what to build" questions came straight from CEO/CTO.
Because feature development speed wasn’t the bottleneck a lot of times.
Arguably the PM role only exists because SWEs don't want to do PM work, and the industry acquiesced to this because SWEs are in very short supply - if you could hire a layperson (sorry) to take a few hours of non-technical work off a SWE's plate, it is worth it.
In a (hypothetical; not quite there yet) world where SWEs are in surplus, there is no reason to have PMs.
The really eye-popping efficiency gains from LLM coding won't come from doing the coding faster but from consolidating the PM, SWE, and QA/SDET roles under the same person. Then you'll start seeing startup/indie level productivity-per-person inside large organizations. Imagine Google is like 50,000 Pieter Levels.