Engineers Are Cannibalizing the Product Manager Role
AI made backlogs, refinements and specs cheap for senior engineers. Teams are shrinking into pods, and most of them won’t need a PM of their own.
I’ve seen it happen more than once. The product manager goes on holiday, or on leave, or gets let go, and the team keeps shipping at the same pace. The board stays in order and refinements still happen. Nobody is left wondering what to build next.
I’ve seen it enough times that I don’t think it’s luck anymore.
My take, and I don’t think it’s a rare one: senior and staff engineers are cannibalizing the product manager role. AI is the reason it’s happening now, and the end state is a product engineer who runs the pod, with a couple of PMs above them looking after the whole product.
The verb comes from World of Warcraft, where Undead characters have an ability called Cannibalize: they feed on a fallen body to recover health. It fits better than I’d like.
When the PM leaves and nothing breaks
If a team can lose its PM for weeks without slowing down, then the work that PM was doing day to day was work the team could already absorb.
In a lot of organizations, that day-to-day work is coordination: writing and ordering tickets, running refinement and planning, chasing answers from stakeholders and keeping the board up to date. It matters. It also doesn’t need a dedicated person anymore, and engineers have been picking it up for years. What changed recently is how cheap AI made it.
Engineers already run the board
Across the industry, engineers are now the ones running the board, the backlog, refinements, plannings and whatever ceremonies their flavor of Scrum or Kanban requires. Plenty of teams still have a PM on the org chart while the engineers do that work in practice.
AI took the friction out of the parts engineers used to avoid. Turning a messy Slack thread into a ticket with acceptance criteria takes a minute. A one-page spec comes out of a short conversation with a model that already has the codebase in context. Breaking an epic into stories is no longer a two-hour meeting.
The tooling has caught up too. Teams wire up Claude skills, or use frameworks like the BMAD Method, to cover the whole software development lifecycle with agents. BMAD’s flow looks roughly like this:
idea / brief
-> analyst agent (research, project brief)
-> pm agent (PRD)
-> architect agent (architecture)
-> scrum master agent (stories)
-> dev agent (code)
-> qa agent (review)The PRD, the document that justified a lot of PM headcount, is now one step in that chain, and an engineer can run it, review it and fix it.
Marty Cagan, probably the best-known defender of the product manager role, said this on the Modern CTO podcast about the Scrum product owner model:
“AI, especially with the new tools like Claude Code, are just making that model irrelevant.”
From teams to pods
The second shift is structural. Teams are being replaced by pods: two or three people with end-to-end ownership of a slice of the product.
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Coinbase is the loudest example. In May 2026 it announced it would cut about 14% of its staff, and Brian Armstrong wrote that the company would experiment with “reduced pod sizes, including ‘one person teams’” with engineers, designers and product managers all in one role (Engadget).
Software houses are already selling the model. Netguru describes teams going from eight to ten people down to two or three, with a “Product Definer” role that evolved from the traditional PM or PO.
Put a dedicated PM in a three-person pod and that PM is a third of the headcount, mostly doing coordination the other two can already do. That math doesn’t survive a budget review.
Who’s left: a couple of PMs and a lot of product engineers
Here’s how I think it shakes out.
At the top, a small number of product managers own the product at a high level. They know every domain, set direction and decide where the pods should point. There are fewer of them, and each one covers more ground.
At the pod level, the engineer is the product owner. They manage the backlog, talk to stakeholders, make the product calls inside their domain and ship the result. That’s the product engineer. It’s an engineer who has absorbed the PM’s day-to-day job and kept writing code.
Greg Bayer wrote in Mind the Product that he’s seeing clients move “towards leaner product teams, where the individual contributor is now front and center.” He also argues the PM role matters as much as ever, “there are just fewer of them.” I agree with both halves. The disagreement is about what happens to everyone who isn’t one of the few.
I’m using “cannibalize” on purpose. Companies will reduce the number of product managers, and engineers will be the ones who absorb the work.
This isn’t for every engineer
The product engineer role fits staff engineers first, and senior engineers who already know the domain.
AI makes writing a ticket cheap. Deciding which ticket matters still depends on knowing the business and the history behind the system. A staff engineer who already sits in the cross-team conversations has most of that context. A senior engineer with a few years in the same domain usually has enough. An engineer who doesn’t know the domain yet can generate a beautiful backlog that points the wrong way.
So if you’re mid-level and want to end up here, spend your time learning the domain. The tools are the easy part.
Where this argument is weakest
Cagan’s strongest point in the same interview: “There is a lot of knowledge that’s needed on your teams that is not in the heads of the engineers.” He’s talking about business viability, legal and compliance, and go-to-market. Pods don’t make that knowledge less necessary. If the engineer doesn’t have it, someone still has to.
Restructurings sold as AI-driven aren’t only about AI either. The Engadget coverage of Coinbase also points to the crypto downturn, and notes that plenty of companies use AI “as a reason (or excuse)” for cuts. And Coinbase announced its one-person teams as an experiment.
Netguru, which sells pods, still says not every team should become one tomorrow, and that highly regulated industries will move slower.
None of that changes where I land. The PMs who own strategy and carry the business knowledge Cagan describes will stay, and they’ll be in more demand. The PM whose week is tickets and ceremonies is the one being cannibalized, because that week is now an engineer’s afternoon with a good set of agents.
What gets cannibalized next
I don’t think it stops at product management. The Netguru pod has no Scrum master and no dedicated QA. Coinbase’s experiment folds design into the same role. Once one person owns a slice end to end, every role that existed to hand work between people is up for review.
If your PM left tomorrow, what would actually stop on your team?
