The biggest difference is that our "PRPs" don't see management as their primary responsibility. They're still an engineer or designer first.

> Every successful startup eventually discovers that the O(n^2) communication overhead of a perfectly flat org doesn't scale, and needs to adapt to deal with that. The question is whether to develop coordination specialists implicitly or explicitly.

Yep. This is certainly something we feel the pain of and are wrestling with right now.

> Developing doublespeak to protect an idealistic worldview from its incompatibility with reality does seem pathological.

By definition, we don't have anyone that plays the role of "manager" right now (again, for better or worse). I wouldn't call that doublespeak.

Is the barely-masked disdain really necessary?

The difference being that instead of having someone who is a "project manager", i.e. that's their job title, all they do is manage and set deadlines and such, you have one of your regular people be the responsible person for some project.

Guessing this is what you mean by "implicitly".

It nicely solves a recurrent enterprise problem where PMs have as their primary duty "go to meetings all day every day" and don't have any understanding of what precisely they're managing.