Have you ever told a relative what you do, only to receive a puzzled look? Product management, as a field, is new. Our parent’s generation didn’t even consider it. Your average non-techie has no idea what it is even about.
How did Product Management as a job come to be? Has it always been around, but in different forms? As product managers, it would be great to understand the history of our profession. Then, we could help answer these questions we commonly get at holiday dinner tables with relatives.
Yet, when I asked my Product Management friends about it a few years ago, no one had a clue. There is shockingly little known broadly about how Product Management came to be.
This set off my years-long obsession with the history of the profession. I thought it would be easy to find a coherent history. But, everything I have read has several obvious flaws and gaps. It seems like writers are rewriting the same bad base article over and over.
The apocryphal story is that it starts with, “brand men,” at Procter & Gamble. Neil McElroy, who never worked as a PM, is called the father of the profession. Excuse me, what?
Are these articles written by PMs or content people? Brand men are not PMs. Plus, obviously PM-type people in consumer goods companies existed in companies hundreds of years before. So, that is just a horrible starting place that makes no sense.
Toyota is also always thrown in there. Sure, the Toyota Product System and Kanban are interesting. But they have nothing to do with PM.
Instead of rewriting the same garbage about consumer goods brand men, I have been reading through troves of different books and old articles to figure out the actual phases of PM’s progression. Now, I think I am about ready to share an interpretation.
Strap in as we explore, “Product Management: A Brief History.” I promise my interpretation of the phases of PM’s history is quite different from what has been written before. Most people have not even broken out the last 5 phases I do, lumping them into one.
Pre-Role
If you want to get philosophical, the whole of human history is product management. The architects of the pyramids invented several new products, like the spiral ramps that allowed the teams of slave laborers to transport the enormous stone blocks.
That was 4,500 years ago. Before that, the architects of Stonehenge devised their own techniques to move 25 ton rocks 150 miles.
In some ways, the people calling the shots for the laborers at Stonehenge and Pyramids were like product managers. In similar ways, architects or project managers have existed across large projects for millenia.
Generally, they were accountable to a king who ordered the construction, and they had to influence the actual builders to build the far out vision incrementally in the fashion they recommend.
This mirrors the life of a product manager. Accountable to the CEO, they have to influence the engineers on a course of incremental actions to reach the ultimate product vision.
But these people went by other names. They did not develop software with the title product management. For this piece, I am focused on the history of folks who were known as product managers. That is, people developing technology products with the title product manager.
To get there, first we have to make a pit stop in the realm of consumer goods.
In 1931, Neil H. McElroy was a junior executive at Procter & Gamble. By that time, nearly 100 years old, the company was amongst the most culturally significant in the US. Neil, a future Secretary of State, was working day in, day out with the future leaders of the country.
Merely getting in, let alone rising to the level of executive, was akin to rising to executive level at Apple, Microsoft, or Google today. It was a role with a lot of pressure and visibility. The substantial pay led to substantial expectations.
The young executive was tasked with managing the Camay brand of soap. Introduced six years earlier as, “The soap for beautiful women,” the brand was growing but leadership wanted to see a new trajectory of sustainable growth.
When Neil got there, the team had many ideas of what to do. Neil had a different perspective. A traveled man, Neil had gotten an up close look at rival consumer products company Unilever in Europe.
Neil zeroed in on building out the promotions department of the Camay brand. He wanted someone to think about the brand, what customers want, and how to position properly. To sharpen his thinking and drum up support for the expensive headcount, he drafted a now famous memo.
In it, he defines several of the most important tenets of promotions management by “brand men.” It is a role where outcomes matter. Up until that point, much of the work for wrappers, promotions, advertising, and brand was managed by the sales department. Neil wanted that responsibility broken out to a new role.
But, what do brand men have to do with product managers? Well, it turns out Neil was not just a future Secretary of State, he was also an advisor to the founders of Hewlett Packard: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. And that is where product managers actually show up for the first time, and our history begins.
Chapter 1 – Hewlett Packard
As Procter & Gamble was an icon in consumer packaged goods, Hewlett Packard was an icon in technology for the half century between 1940 and 1990. It sustained unbroken 20%+ year-on-year growth.
One of the early innovations at Hewlett Packard was actually creating the product manager role. At some point in the 1940s, product manager became a title. Influenced by the success of Brand Men at Procter & Gamble, on the advice of Neil, Bill and Dave consistently supported the product management function throughout its history.
Like brand men took a responsibility from the sales department at Procter, the product managers took a responsibility from the engineering managers at Hewlett. Product managers were tasked with decision making for the product engineering teams, staying close to the customer, and advocating for the voice of the user internally.
Before product managers, the role was a mix of the CEO, the executives managing a division, and the engineering managers. Suddenly, a product manager was inserted, accountable to the CEO and executives, enabling the engineering managers to focus on the technical components of building a product.
While technology had been built for millenia with people telling workers what to do, for the first time, product managers were inserted into the scene who had to influence without authority.
In this phase, the profession remained fairly small. Outside of the consumer goods player’s “brand men,” and Hewlett Packard, the profession was fairly contained.
Chapter 2 – SCRUM Comes
In 1986, the Harvard Business Review published, “The New Product Development Game.” The article by Hirotka Takeuchi and Ijukiro Nonaka reads as well today as it did then. In it, they outline fast and flexible processes that are a better way to do product development.
Using case studies of several of the most successful companies of the era – including Hewlett Packard – they outline a counter-intuitive way to build products. It has 5 main components:
- Built-in instability: the teams pursue broad and challenging goals, but have a wide measure of freedom to accomplish them
- Self-organizing project teams: the teams are autonomous, but since they are motivated by the same things, assemble on their own cross-functionally
- Overlapping development phases: versus the Rugby method of slowly moving down the field, several processes close together parallelize
- Multilearning: when failures or successes happen, they are shared for learning at individual, group, and company levels to foster cross-functional understanding
- Subtle control: who is on teams, the work environment, evaluation, and celebration of failures are used as deliberate systems to encourage desired behavior
The article would prove to be very influential. Scrum would grow slowly in the beginning years, but the curve was exponential. Eventually, SCRUM grew to be the upper case, even though it is not an acronym and not used as such by Takeuchi and Nonaka.
In 1987, Ken Schwaber published “SCRUM Development Process.” He focused on how it is hard to plan, estimate, and successful complete work, especially software. To deliberately move further from overlapping, yet still waterfall spirit of Takeuchi and Nonaka, he described a new SCRUM process that includes iteration.
The process caught on majorly. Buoyed by the writings of Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaeber and others, SCRUM would continue to grow in momentum over the years. The hockey-stick-like ascent snuck up on many software development professionals.
However, the role of Product Owner (PO) that many of you would expect actually did not formally get added until 2002. Instead, SCRUM was mainly practiced by developers. Engineering managers often played the roles of Scrum master and product owner.
At the same time SCRUM was rising, before the PO role was added, the 90s were happening. Tech companies were proliferating, and so, too, was product management.
Chapter 3 – Dot Com Era
With the rise of software, startups and venture capital extended beyond semiconductor investments and into bits. Suddenly, much smaller teams could make a much larger impact. They did not need to build an expensive manufacturing facility.
The internet vastly accelerated this process, and there was a cambrian explosion of new technology companies. With the internet, a startup at most needed to hire a few programmers and host a few servers.
Product management had a fairly mixed reputation at this point. Startups featuring early employees who had seen the role at Hewlett Packard tended to implement it.
Even at those companies however, it was not an early role hired at most companies. Those that did hire a PM tended to do so only for their biggest products. It was a later role, used to accelerate customer advocacy to engineering teams and create an accountable owner for ever-increasing executive and marketing teams.
As Rafayel Mkrtchyan notes, the big advocates at this time were companies like Intuit. Intuit was founded by a former Procter & Gamble brand man, in fact, Scott Cook. With their first product Quicken, they created a home finance software product than an intelligent stay-at-home mom could build.
It was a classically PM-build product. They identified a specific user segment, understood her user needs, and designed a product for her. Then they iterated along the way. Intuit’s customer-centricity put a deep imprint on the product management career, and helped increase the number of the people with the title.
With the success of Intuit and HP, some companies were hiring PMs. But it was not a part of every software development team quite yet.
In addition, where it was practiced, it was not uniform. Companies like Microsoft built out their Program Management functions. These were product managers who were expected to do some technical program management. It was their own twist.
Chapter 4 – The Agile Revolution
In 2001, the Agile Manifesto was published by 17 authors – including SCRUM founder Jeff Sutherland. It ended up having even more impact than SCRUM. Suddenly, people on product teams – engineers, designers, product managers where they existed – were asked to build software differently.
It worth thinking about just how many things changed:
- Instead of waterfall, teams were asked for early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
- Instead of silos, business people and developers were encouraged to work together
- Instead of processes, projects were to be built around motivated individuals
- Instead of complex tools, simplicity became essential
- Instead of hierarchical decision-making, teams were to be self-organizing
- Instead of quarterly planning, reflection and tuning were to become regular
Despite SCRUM existing, most companies still had most, if not all of the, “instead of.” Agile helped change that. This had profound impacts on the lives of software development teams.
Those software development teams without product managers felt the pinch on their bandwidth. They were being asked to do a lot more. Instead of doing so, they hired someone. This led to continued uptick in the profession’s commonality.
In addition, for those product managers who were already practicing the profession, Agile profoundly changed the relationship between engineers and product managers. The relationship shifted, as Martin Erikson describes it, from adversarial to collaborative. It helped get rid of the barrier between research, specification, and development phases of a project. Overall, it permeated the practices of what a product manager does into the software development process.
Agile, like SCRUM, would continue a sneaky, exponential growth trajectory. In 2007, the book, “Scaling Software Agility,” served to introduce the Scaled Agile Framework (Safe). Safe ended up massively expanding the reach of SCRUM into government software development.
So while Agile started in 2001, it has been a consistent driver of the increase in product owners and product managers throughout software development teams globally. But, it was not the only important driver in that time period.
Chapter 5 – Google’s Embrace
In the late 90s, Google did not have any product people. Larry and Sergey, along with the engineers, played the role. So, when Larry and Sergey hired Marissa Mayer as an engineer, they expected her to focus on code. But, quickly Marissa showed she was good at a lot more than code. Customer insight, attention to detail, and roadmapping were all skills of hers.
This landed her a promotion to Product Manager, a newly created role at the company. She “accidentally” became a PM. But, everyone on the team saw her value. When she wanted to hire more people to her team, she was supported.
But, Google was not a trillion dollar company in 2002. A small startup in Palo Alto, lesser known than the much bigger Yahoo, Marissa was looking for a way to attract the best young talent. Stanford grads like herself, Larry, and Sergey had all the options in the world.
Looking to brand the product manager job for new Stanford grads, Marissa created the Google Associate Product Manager (APM) program. The now-legendary program would go on to not only recruit, but also nurture, many of the most important next generation of product managers.
Over the years, these product managers have helped set the tone for the entire product management industry. Plus, their lucrative impact and extensive post-APM impact have made the role the envy of Silicon Valley aspirants around the world.
More generally, since 2002, Google has been a key driving force in the rise of product management. The company has regularly hired and paid the best, given them platforms at conferences and on blogs, and, with Sundar Pichai, elevated one to CEO. Like HP and Intuit before it, Google has been critically important to the rise of PM.
Chapter 6 – Product Takes a Seat
With forces like SCRUM, Agile, as well as companies like Intuit and Google, product management would continue its rise in the mid 2000s. Up until this point, the “primary job” of a product manager was considered to be writing product requirements documents (PRD). Marty Cagan was most well-known for his 27-page piece, “How to Write a Good PRD.”
But as product managers grew more ubiquitous, the notion of product managers as “CEOs of their product,” began to become ubiquitous throughout Silicon Valley. This increased the mystique and impact of the profession.
With important PMs like Marissa Mayer calling the shots, product management stopped reporting up through marketing or engineering. Instead, product became its own dedicated function that reports to the CEO. This was a profound shift for the function, one that I have not even seen written about anywhere else – which is a huge disservice to those histories.
In 2006, things were already changing. Marty wrote, “Revisiting the Product Spec.” With Marty, so did the rest of the profession follow. Product became a strategic role that helps define how to take advantage of things like SCRUM and agile to develop software best. Instead of taking directions from execs, PMs began to own vision and strategy. The shift began from output to outcomes.
Chapter 7 – Big Tech Darling
As Product Management became a more important role, it proliferated across the most important tech companies. Through the mid-2000’s, virtually every technology company began to establish PM groups. Amazon, Netflix, and the rest of the big tech names hired and empowered PMs.
In 2007, the gospel of product management began to spread further with Dan Olsen’s publishing of The Lean Product Playbook. With the demands of discovery and iteration, startups hired more PMs.
Then, in 2008, Marty published Inspired. The book provided a practical handbook for PMs and companies across the world. It went through vision, strategy, discovery, and management. This helped the big tech PMs, in particular, succeed.
Then, those big tech names massively succeeded. FAANG became an acronym. Some PMs, like Sundar Pichai, rose to become CEOs and billionaires.
With that success, PMs continued to gain more prominence. PM began growing like a weed outside the big tech companies as well. Everyone wanted to be like those tech names.
Chapter 8 – Here Come the Schools
As Product Management grew to become millions of practitioners, the schools arrived. It is easy to ignore these schools. But Product Management, up until recently, had no certification or degree. It was a job, unlike engineering or design, that people from many different backgrounds came into.
In 2014, Carlos Gonzalez founded Product School. It would be easy to dismiss a school, but the program has actually been pivotal for the PM profession. When you search google Trends for PM, for instance, it is one of the top topics.
The company recently raised a $25M financing last year to cap off 7 years of pushing the profession forward. Its blog posts, podcasts, and highly attended talks (pre-Covid) have helped push the theory-crafting and professionalism of the job forward.
Theory-crafting would further be pushed by Brian Balfour and the Reforge team. Since its founding in 2016, and addition of PM courses a few years later, Reforge has push forward the thinking of what a PM should be. Bringing in strong product leaders from like Keya Patel of Dropbox, it has been setting the standard for topics like PM specialization.
Where product school has found its niche mostly for early career folks, Reforge has excelled for middle career folks. With a fresh $21M in funding and new courses like Mastering Product Management, it continues to help PMs make more impact.
But certifications and part time programs only do so much. In the end, degrees mean a lot. In 2017, Carnegie Mellon began offering the first degree program from a highly reputable technical school, its Masters in Product Management. Programs like CMU’s are pushing forward interest, and qualified candidates, into product management.
With all the new talent, there has been a thirst for PM content. In 2019, Lenny Rachitsky launched his newsletter. Now over 85,000 subscribers, his newsletter has help spread the gospel of PM. Recently, hundreds of thousands of PMs have been hired in India, as the startup tech scene explodes there. Many of those newly christened PMs read Lenny.
Chapter 9 – Today: The Hottest New Job
This all brings us to today. We live in the, “Golden Age of Product Management.” As I wrote about in 2019, PM is the hottest job for MBAs at top schools. PMs are compensated well, and many of the top grads want to become one.
With the growth of the profession, we have finally seen tools even being built. Software like UserVoice, pendo.io, productboard and more are purpose-built for PMs.
The whole ecosystem is reaching a crescendo. People like myself are jumping into the content creation game to serve the growing audience.
By some estimates, there is one product manager for every seven software developers in the world today. Using that ratio, there are about 4 million practicing PMs in the world today.
Chapter 10 – Future of Product Management
So, where do we go from here? Predictions are hard, and experts tend to be bad at them. As a PM of 16 years, I have my biases. I saw the era of spec focus. I have seen the growth of strategy and vision. Now, I am managing a team of PMs.
I have three predictions for where PM will go:
- More people will become software developers, resulting in more PMs. I expect the 7:1 ratio, roughly, to continue. In a future world where blue-collar workers are coders, I expect hundreds of millions of developers, and tens of millions of PMs.
- Product management will become a widely known profession. Today, only techies know Sundar Pichai was a product manager. When I tell my home contractor, I am a PM, he has no idea what I am talking about. But in a few decades, everyone will know.
- PMs will grow in impact. Many PMs are still locked into a world where they are held accountable for outcomes, but they have no authority. This has made project management the easy path. I think, in the future, PMs will be more strategic and impactful.
What do you think? Where will PM go? I took a different take on the entire middle and late chapters of product management from the existing texts and talks on the subject. Did I miss anything?
