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I agree, but I think the death of it will be the same thing that brought it into existence; technology.
A big part of the emergence of the PMC was that technologies in various domains, but most especially in transportation and communication, allowed for corporations and governments to become larger and more complex. Where, before, a company was only about as big as the number of relationships a central manager (often The President of the company) could, well, manage, telecommunications, expedited travel (for purposes of shipping if nothing else), and cheap and quick document copying made the entire idea of "middle managers" possible.
Anyone who's worked in software knows that the primary responsibility of a Product Manger (PM) is to mostly coordinate between sales, engineering, marketing, and the executives. Depending on the specific company there may be more or less stakeholders, but you get the idea. While the PM job is always marketed (and self-reported) to be about "crafting a vision for the product!" the truth of it is you're dealing with multiple groups that sort of hate each other or, at the least, don't get along. You facilitate the communication. If you do it well, you slowly accrue political capital either explicitly or implicitly. The PM vertical is often a path to COO or CEO because of the ambiguous soft-power nature of the job. It is the ultimate technical-adjacent PMC gig.
LLMs / A(G)I is going to destroy the power of the PM by making their job easier. PMs will request that all of the various stakeholders (marketing, engineering, sales, etc.) simply send various documents and reports to the PM. He or she will then point an LLM at it with vague prompts along the lines of "resolve conflicting priorities, organize a sprint plan, calculate budget" etc. etc. etc. And the LLM will do it. Well enough. And the covert power games that a lot of PMs play including hiding information between groups, playing politics and personalities off of one another, injecting themselves into obvious successes while running away from failures, and trend-chasing budget leverage matches will disappear because ... the information will simply be flowing between these groups with far, far less friction.
Bezos at Amazon had an infamous e-mail wherein he essentially told all of the product groups within Amazon that they had to work with one another using APIs only. Here's a link that explains it well. Bezos realized that if these different product teams needed to cross-coordinate, it would eventually break amazon as they would scale to so many product teams that coordination, done manually, would easily eat up 1000s of collective hours per week. LLMs 10x or maybe 100x the reduction of friction based on the same principle Bezos relied on here.
Culturing warring to change the culture (i.e. get rid of the PMC) might be noble, but, at best, its a war of attrition with a very entrenched interest who will use all sorts of nasty tricks (DEI etc.) to keep itself in place. But it's far harder to fight against a good technology. Take the best software engineer on the planet - if he has to write all of his code on a typewriter, he is now the worst software engineer on the planet. So, a PM who continues to try and run time consuming team Zoom meetings, who wants to create process forms left and right, and who plays office politics will simply start to produce less than the LLM enabled PM. But that very LLM enabled PM will reveal the job for what it is - glorified Virtual Assistant. Executives will start to realize they ought not to replace their engineers with LLMs necessarily, but that they should replace folks who's jobs' are mostly about coordination and communication. (Side note: Coordination and communication don't require absolute specific correctness the way say some financial jobs might. Hallucinations are totally acceptable as long as the "gist" is clear conveyed).
So, Elon. He's got his chainsaw, he's got his DOGEs with him, he's getting into fights with Little Marco Rubio.
A better move would be to find another $1 bn for Grok.
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