I'm fairly convinced that a company that replaced their PM:s with socially competent (i.e not complete cave trolls with no sense for UX) engineers (that of course would also get their hands dirty in an operational manner) would be far more successful than than a company that rides the PM/product dev hype wave. I think there is an apparent disconnect between the expectations of a full fledged PM and what the average PM actually seem to deliver on a daily basis in your avarage company.

This is of course a generalization and I bet there are dedicated PM:s that actually pull their weight, and I might very well only had bad experiences, but this is aimed at what I consider to be the avarage company.

Has anyone deployed and actually used a similar model? If so; what are your conclusions?