I think the idea they're pushing is, why force a centralized structure for product development/design decisions, when your programmers are intelligent and independent enough to do it themselves? It's not just a free-for-all where people work on shiny toys; developers should be allowed to think about the customer too! It's quite a different energy when the same guy is recognizing what needs work (i.e, what a 'product manager' would do) and developing it.
Think about the Linux kernel - contributions are distributed and asynchronous, and most of the authority figures arise organically rather than by decree. I don't think you need product managers, they just relieve the developers of having to do that work themselves.
And yeah, it definitely helps that github uses github to write github. But dogfooding really isn't that unusual or difficult.
Think about the Linux kernel - contributions are distributed and asynchronous, and most of the authority figures arise organically rather than by decree. I don't think you need product managers, they just relieve the developers of having to do that work themselves.
And yeah, it definitely helps that github uses github to write github. But dogfooding really isn't that unusual or difficult.