As Engineering Teams get smaller, is the Technical Program Manager the missing piece?

Do you remember what a "normal" software team looked like?A product manager, an engineering manager, a designer, and six or seven engineers. Weekly planning meetings, a backlog to groom, a sprint to run. For most of the last decade, that was just... how teams worked. It was the water we all swam in.That was my daily life as an software engineer and then an engineering manager for most of my career. That shape was so familiar it felt like a law of nature rather than a design choice.I recently came across an article on the LeadDev website that argued that traditional team shape is breaking apart - and fast. AI is reshaping the traditional team structure that engineering managers are used to, and the engineering manager (EM) role itself is splitting into two very different futures. One stays close to the code. The other expands outward across multiple teams, with ratios that would have seemed absurd five years ago.It's a well-argued piece and I agree with most of it. But reading it, I…