Yes, there was a dedicated PM - she was essentially at the top of the food chain, running the steering committee meetings (both the core team and individual feature teams) and coordinating the effort with all the team leads/managers (hardware, software, QA, product release engineering, regulatory, source control management, requirements engineering, and technical documentation). As I stated, there some 30+ people involved in the project. So the team leads/managers would at times do PM-like activities, more or less working hand-in-hand with the PM to get things through the system, organized, scheduled, signed-off etc.
BTW, I imagine you're mostly keying off the comment "He was the one who cleared pathways with other teams/resources (ie. ensured QA was on target to line up an availability window, how many engineers they could provide, etc)." That isn't an entirely true statement -- the PM would be the one to get this set in stone and pull rank if needed, esp. working with PMs for other projects or upper management. But as a team lead myself on another (albeit smaller) project, for instance, I would constantly be moving around the company talking with the other leads/managers to do exploratory work on where people were at even before the core team kicked off, building bridges so to speak. And between the core team meetings the unexpected would happen. Sometimes that would be a discussion with other leads, sometimes it would make more sense to bring it up with the PM, but generally speaking her plate was pretty full so I would take as much off of it as I could.
The team lead wasn't in particular overworked, he just spent the majority of his time in management type activities, perhaps about 1/3 of his time actually designing/coding/creating documentation.
