A brief history of product management
A short article on how product management started, evolved over the years and where it might be headed next.
Often when I’m curious about any topic, I try reading about its history. Reading its history broadens my perspective and helps me better understand why things are how they are today. Interestingly, reading the history of something also has a way of humbling us and compelling us to appreciate the points we tend to overlook or disregard. I guess it seems only right then that we spend some time reading about the history of the job we spend most of our waking life doing.
How did the product management role start? How did it evolve over the years? Where is it going next?
How the role started
If you define a PM as the person responsible for the product — from building the product to tracking and owning its performance to promoting it, then you might regard Neil H. McElroy, a marketing manager at Procter & Gamble as the inventor of product management.
It began when McElroy wrote a 800 words memo laying down the concept of a new role which later became known as “The Brand Man”.
The Brand Man would be someone solely focussed on the brand or product, rather than the business as a whole.
The Brand Man would be responsible for tracking the sales of the product, for advertising promotions and would constantly work to improve the product. This person would focus on only and only one thing — the product.
Industrialisation of The Brand Man
Interestingly introducing the concept of product management is possibly not even McElroy’s most famous accomplishment. Not only did he go on to become the Secretary of Defence, he also helped found NASA. Talk about a successful career!
However, while McElroy may have been the inventor of product management, it took others to make the role mainstream or say to “industrialise” the role. The Henry Fords for product management were in fact Bill Hewlett and David Packard — the duo who created Hewlett Packard, the widely successful global computers brand.
It was at Hewlett Packard, that The Brand Man truly became the voice of the customer. The person voicing the customer’s view through the product development process. Most modern day product managers would understand this and identify their responsibilities with this.
How some of the concepts we use today were born
HP played a major role in making mainstream so many of the concepts we use today. Post World War, resource shortages and cashflow problems fast-tracked innovation in Japan, leading to the development of a new method for manufacturing — “Just In Time” (JIT) manufacturing. HP was the first company in the West to adopt JIT and use it across its teams.
Another concept invented in Japan by Toyota and then evangelised in the West by HP is the globally used Kanban board — a method or tool most tech companies use today to conduct and track their tech development sprints.
The Kanban board, invented by Taiichi Ohno started off as a simple physical board with cards that could be moved into different categories and could be used to track the different stages of development.
Thus HP played a major role in evangelising these new practices in the West. Not surprisingly, when leaders from HP would move to the Bay Area to start their own company, many of them promoted and followed these practices in their startups.
From FMCG to Tech
The first product managers and in fact the majority of product managers in FMCG companies today are part of the marketing function. These product managers would focus on understanding their customers’ needs and finding a solution for those needs using the 4Ps of marketing.
However, the product development cycles of FMCG products are extremely long and so the majority of these PMs would tend to focus primarily on the last 3Ps of marketing — place, price & promotion. They would spend the majority of their time and efforts in pricing the product right and focussing on packaging and promotion of the product rather than on the product development of the product.
Much of this changed when product management came to the tech world.
Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit was a former “Brand Man” from Proctor & Gamble himself. No surprises then that when he started Intuit in the eighties, he evangelised this concept within the company and Intuit went onto to play a major role in formalising and making mainstream the role of product management in the software world. A few years later Microsoft introduced a new role called “program management” which was heavily inspired from the concept of product management. This helped further formalise the role in the software industry.
But what made the role of PMs in the tech industry different from that of their counterparts in the FMCG industry?
Most tech companies were creating new industries from scratch and hence they could not rely on just pricing and packaging to make their product succeed.
This brought product development back to the centre of product management.
It also helped companies realise that it is important to not only understand the customers’ needs but also to align product development with them.
Product managers get a seat at the big table
Life for a product leader today is a little different from how things used to be a decade ago when most product managers were considered part of either the engineering or the marketing function. In many cases product managers would even report to the engineering or marketing heads.
Today, most product leaders have a seat at the management table. They report directly to the CEO or are often CEOs themselves and their teams work closely but independently from the marketing and engineering functions.
Reporting directly to the CEO or in many cases being the CEOs themselves, helps product leaders to function as the thread connecting the company’s vision with it’s execution efforts. It also gives product leaders and product managers who report to them the independence required to make tough calls and to function as leaders in critical cross-functional discussions.
With the product leader communicating the product vision across the organisation, the product manager can now focus on understanding the needs of the user and aligning sales and marketing teams to jointly work towards delivering the right solution at the right price and achieve the business goals of the company.
What’s next for product management?
Some say product management is an art. Some say it’s a science. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between. But seeing how product management has evolved over the past few years — the pendulum seems to be swinging firmly towards science. More and more of product management today is framework driven — be it product prioritisation, building new products or product analytics.
While customer empathy might still lie at the heart of a product manager’s role, the reliance on analytics and data today is more than ever.
Most product managers today work with data everyday. They write their own SQL queries, create their own dashboards and interpret their own experiments.
There is a common saying that data is the new oil. With industry leaders like Facebook and Google harvesting and analysing data on billions of people, data science is predicted to become central to the role of product management.
In the future, product managers might spend as much time daily working with data scientists and machine learning engineers as they do with software engineers and product designers today. Even business-product managers would need to know more about data science capabilities — what they can and cannot do.
They might need to define and own data models unique to their business and customer-base and draw out their KPIs using these data models. More and more of their new feature ideas might come from data science teams and from insights gathered from data models created by them. Product leaders might need to work with data science leaders to create a data strategy for the company that is in coherence with the company’s product strategy.
In the future, it might not suffice to have a product moat. You might also need a data moat.
Maybe it’s not a surprise then that even today some of the highest earning product mangers in the world are specialising in data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. In many cases they moved into product management from one of these roles.
At the end of the day, we’d probably be better off being the kind of product managers we like being and are good at being. If you’re a PM who enjoys the UI/UX side of product management most, maybe that’s what you should do. Core elements of product management like UI/UX, business acumen and customer research will of course continue to remain essential to the job. But it may soon prove hard to ignore the reality that data science will take its place at the very heart of product management.
