How product companies operate without BAs, Scrum Masters, Release Managers, etc - Ant Murphy

Product companies don't have armies of BAs, Release Managers, and Delivery Managers because they've eliminated the underlying problems these roles exist to solve. In traditional enterprises, product managers feed work to engineers who are treated as execution machines. Product companies flip this: product, design, and engineering collaborate to define work together. Engineers write their own tickets because they're closest to the problems. Engineering leaders own delivery because the people doing the work are best positioned to understand dependencies, give estimates, and make smart decisions. This isn't about letting engineers code more - it's about optimizing for outcomes instead of output.

The real difference is cognitive load. Traditional enterprises solve problems by adding roles: releasing is hard so hire a Release Manager, delivery feels slow so get a Delivery Manager. But this treats symptoms, not causes. Product companies ask different questions: Why do we have so many dependencies in the first place? How do we eliminate them rather than manage them? They decouple deployments, releases, and launches - new features can go to production behind feature flags anytime, then get turned on incrementally when it makes sense. When you deploy in really small batches, there's not much to manage. No big bang releases means dramatically less change overhead.

The pattern repeats everywhere: less coordination overhead means fewer coordination roles. Higher cohesion across teams means less time spent in alignment meetings doing mental gymnastics. Avoiding the optimization problem - where teams spend weeks trying to build one solution for everyone's edge cases - means fewer meetings and fewer people to consult. Organizations that operate this way actively monitor and reduce cognitive load. They know clarity scales better than process. When it's clear whether something is in your remit or not, there's more action and more agency. When teams think big but work small, releases are manageable without dedicated release managers.

This isn't about product companies being perfect or having no challenges. It's about understanding that when you reduce cognitive load systematically, you need fewer roles to manage the chaos. Great leaders see their job as making their team's life easier, not their own. They don't optimize for keeping engineers busy - they optimize for teams solving the right problems with minimal overhead.