ImpressCMS Core Development

In my work environment (Banking & Insurance), we have lead developers, program managers and project managers.

The program manager is responsible for the general direction, and translating that into requirements. He/She has the view over the different releases.
The project manager's responsability is to take those requirements for a specific release, and focus on getting the requirements implemented in time.
The Lead developer is tasked with translating the requirements that are decided upon by the project manager, and transforming them into technical language.

In our case, I would say the project manager position is what is done now under the heading 'release manager' (i.e. he gets things released). The program management function is more of a concensus thing, which is cool for an open source project.

At the moment, we have no separation between what will be done in the current release (release management) and how it will be done in code (lead dev).

I'm not saying that the release manager can't be a developer, but keeping track of both the 'business side' (what) and the 'technical side' (how) is quite complicated for just one person.

Splitting those up might make some areas easier to keep track of (code review, code standards). The release manager should have the ultimate decision when things clash of course.