Here's the context.

We're a fast growing startup. We used to be very engineer driven since we don't have any PM (Product Manager), and engineer work very closely with designer to ship product features.

Now as the company grows, we started to have PMs. They're really helpful with talking to customers, writing docs, aligning stakeholders, etc.

However, recently I felt more and more that engineers are being faded out from the picture. It seems that PMs now has taken over a big portion of "fun part of the job": figuring out what to build, iterating on the spec. We're basically converging to a model where, PM + design figures out what to build, write a doc/spec, hand it over to engineer to build it (and then iterate by going back to step 2).

This is made worse by the fact that, we don't have an official tech lead role (IMO). The direct line of contact between eng and PMs are via eng managers. PMs might involve eng managers when doing something (but often not), and more often than not, managers are, 1. don't have enough tech context, 2. are too busy. As a result, as an (senior) eng ICs, I feel less and less involvement in product decisions.

I've given this feedback to managers and leadership, and I've seen some signs of improvement, but at the same time, I worry it's systemically setup to be this way. It has happened quite a few times, where engineers are building Feature X, and at the exact same time, PM/designer are taking a pass at redesigning Feature X to be better (without involving engineers, it often comes out as a surprise).

This is seen as a result of "it takes time to build feature and PM also needs to do stuff" and "we don't want to distract engineers", but I also sense our system don't automatically include engineers in such decisions/from the beginning, it's kind of like being a minority in a not-inclusive-by-default environment: You can voice up, it may improve and people are open-minded , but if the system is setup this way, engineers just need to keep forcing-their-way-through.

I do not have too much experience with PMs before, maybe this is the way it meant to be. I'm wondering: - Is this normal? What's some pros/cons? - How can this be changed? Does setting up a official tech lead role help?