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Don't confuse human management with project management. In my opinion, you should have two separate people doing those jobs. Your manager should be managing interpersonal issues, team communication, and making sure that tasks don't get dropped, but deciding what direction to go in should be up to someone else - perhaps the team as a whole deciding through consensus, perhaps an outside editor.

Well said. Product management runs product, tech management makes sure the org is running smoothly and everybody's happy and delivering.

Management isn't the only approach to solving that problem. F.ex Simco or Valve have self-organising teams with high degrees of democracy, which cause roughly the same effect.

But in the end (shareholders aside, which if you have any I guess you have to please), a company without management would only have engineers to please, making this kind of a circular problem.

Customers?