Comment by mathattack

My experience is every layer between the communicator and the recipient adds noise. It's like the game of telephone we played as kids. Some PMs are terrible and are 100% noise. Even the best are only 50% signal.

Give an engineer a clear understanding of the end need, and you have a tremendous gain in efficiency. I think there is a 10X benefit here that's similar to the 10X benefit from stronger engineering skills.

You still need PMs, though it's a different job that passing papers back and forth.