Industry sentiment increasingly suggests that more than 95% of product managers are simply not required. Founders and executives have openly stated that up to 90% of these jobs are redundant, as core coordination, user research, and execution tasks can easily be absorbed by engineers, designers, or business operations staff. This has triggered an internal crisis of faith, leading to the rise of "Frauduct Managers"—individuals who entered the profession expecting to make a significant impact but now feel like their roles are a scam, consisting of endless alignment meetings, drafting PRDs, and administrative overhead without any real authority.
The fundamental issue is that many tech structures are actually building projects, not products. The widespread "product mindset" has been pushed to a level of insanity, resulting in the placement of product managers in highly specialized technical areas like data/backend teams where they are completely unnecessary. This setup floods organizations with data while leaving teams no wiser, creating an information controlled hierarchy that suppresses technical talent. When engineering capacity is artificially bottlenecked by administrative layers, it merely introduces overhead, driving teams back to a state where Scrum Masters or even direct squad leads contribute more to actual team velocity and project success.