This isn't an attack on project managers. Some of them are great. This is about what happens when roles get misaligned with outcomes.
The Incentive Problem
When a team is small, coordination happens naturally. Four people in a room don't need a project manager. They talk to each other. They know what everyone is working on. Problems surface quickly because everyone can see them.
When the team grows, someone suggests hiring a project manager. Makes sense — someone to keep things organized. But here's the subtle problem: the PM's job is to manage. If there's nothing to manage, there's no job. So the incentive, even unconsciously, is to create things to manage.
More processes. More meetings. More status reports. More documentation. Each one individually sounds reasonable. Together, they create a layer of overhead that didn't exist before.
The Observer Effect
In physics, the observer effect says that measuring something changes it. The same thing happens with management. When someone is watching and measuring your work, you change how you work. You optimize for being observed — making your work visible, trackable, reportable — instead of optimizing for the work itself.
Developers start spending more time updating tickets than writing code. Designers start creating status documents instead of designs. The overhead of being managed becomes a significant part of the job.
What Good Management Looks Like
Good management is invisible. It removes obstacles. It creates clarity about priorities. It shields the team from distractions. It doesn't add work — it removes it.
The best project managers I've worked with spent their time clearing the path, not monitoring the walkers. They asked "what's in your way?" not "what did you do yesterday?"
If your PM is creating more work than they're removing, something is backwards. The point of management is to make the team more productive, not more documented.