I share the objection to power-silly PMs but might add that a good CEO doesn’t micro-manage and dictate solutions to her team either. Ideally, you shape goals and while you might bring ideas, a good CEO has hopefully hired people she can trust to make their own decisions, use their own creativity, and create good results against those goals.

At the end of the day, I think a well-functioning team needs at least one strong leader who can pull the team forward, help think through compromises, keep things focused and optimistic, and make the tough calls most people don’t want to make. Those are traits of a good CEO, but again those are things a CEO should help drive with the input from others, not in isolation. The leader on a team can be the PM, engineer or designer, but it often is the PM because that is a multi-tasking role rather than a deep-dive “get in the flow” role like the other two (as a generality).

At Neo we ran experiments to see how flat we could make things, and I saw very talented teams without this kind of leader end up drifting.

I should note that far more important than organizational hierarchy is having people with a leadership state of mind.