A Brief History of Product Management
Product management as a formal discipline is relatively young — most accounts trace its origins to the 1930s — but its roots go deeper than any formal organizational structure. Wherever someone was responsible for understanding what customers needed, translating those needs into product direction, and coordinating the development of solutions, something like product management was happening.
Understanding this history provides context for the role’s current form and insight into where it might evolve.
The Brand Management Origins
The commonly cited origin of formal product management is a 1931 memo from Neil McElroy at Procter & Gamble. McElroy argued that each brand needed a dedicated manager responsible for its entire life — understanding the customer, developing strategy, coordinating advertising, monitoring competitive performance, and driving the business results associated with the brand.
This brand manager concept — the person who owned the strategy and results for a specific product, coordinating across functions without formal authority over them — is recognizable as the ancestor of modern product management.
The Tech Industry Transformation
Product management as it’s practiced in technology organizations today developed primarily in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, as software products required a new kind of coordination between engineering teams (who built the product) and market teams (who sold and supported it). The bridge role — understanding both the technical and the commercial — became product management.
The term “product manager” and the role as a distinct organizational function in technology companies crystallized in this period, influenced significantly by companies like HP and Apple and later by the product management practices of Netscape, Microsoft, and Google.
The Agile Era
The publication of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 significantly changed how product management was practiced in software organizations. The product owner role in Scrum, the emphasis on continuous delivery and user feedback, and the shift from specification-driven to discovery-driven development created a new set of product management practices — and a new vocabulary for the discipline.
The Current Era: Product-Led Growth and Platform Products
Contemporary product management is increasingly defined by two trends: the rise of product-led growth (where the product itself is the primary acquisition, retention, and expansion mechanism), and the proliferation of platform products (where the product is infrastructure that other products are built on). Each of these product types creates distinctive product management challenges that earlier eras didn’t have to address.
Key Takeaways
Product management evolved from brand management’s single-owner accountability model, through the technical coordination needs of Silicon Valley software development, through the agile methodology transformation, to the product-led growth and platform product challenges of the current era. Understanding this history contextualizes the role’s current practices and suggests that the discipline will continue evolving as the nature of the products being built continues to change.