The Real History of Product Management
How the role of the Product Manager has evolved through history
If you search LinkedIn for people with the title “Product Manager,” you’ll get over 1 million results. That’s a lot of product managers. This leads us all to wonder where the heck this role came from and why it has exploded in the last decade.
Most articles about the history of product management will tell you that the role originated in the 1930s at Proctor & Gamble, but the need for product managers goes way further back than that. Some version of product management has been around for as long as humans have been trying to figure out the right thing to build for customers. To understand the origins of this job, we need to go way way back. So grab some popcorn and enjoy our historical reenactment of the origins of modern-day product management. 🍿🎥
When we started piecing together the evolution of the modern product manager, it became clear that communication was at the core of it all. Each new technology era brought new communication challenges. Builders and customers grew further apart, and the knowledge gaps within companies increased as technology advanced. And every time this happened, someone would point out that a bridge was missing and that someone needed to connect customer needs to business capabilities.
Neil H. McElroy called it out in 1931 with his famous “Brand Men” memo. The Agile Manifesto made the same point in 2001 in the Internet age, and we saw footage of a frustrated Steve Jobs in 1986 asking, “Whose job is it??”
Someone must be the glue, holding it all together and communicating across business units and with customers. In each era, those people were the product managers, whether or not they had the official title.
Let’s see how the role evolved over time.
Blacksmith product managers
To understand the origins of product management and why the role exists in the first place, we took it back to a simpler time, to 1500 B.C. (though arguably the AI-generated background was more like 1300 A.D.; this was a low-budget documentary 😜) and the product managers who we imagine worked in the blacksmith trade back in the day.
Ok, so the story about Edward and Sir John is fictional. The point is that people have been building products and selling stuff to customers throughout human history. So there’s always been someone who converted user needs and business goals into a plan of action for the builders to build the stuff to sell.
I like to use a simple definition when I describe what product managers do. In a nutshell:
Product managers figure out what their team should build with limited time and resources, and they do whatever it takes to make their product great.
If we think about the role like this, with all the tech-industry jargon removed, then, yeah, people have been doing this job since the beginning of trade and commerce.
We saw Blacksmith PM and PM2 both take on this role. They were both under a time crunch to interpret the customers’ needs, communicate those needs back to the technologists, and deliver products to their customers on time, and that would be of value to both the customer and the business. PM2 was more skilled in what we now call discovery and delivery techniques, so his team produced a superior product.
Figuring out the right thing to build was easier back then because communication was easier. People only made a single custom product at a time for a customer they knew deeply, with technology that was generally understood by the entire team, and the results of their labor had clear results, which the whole village understood.
Industrialization breaks product management
If we jump forward centuries to industrialization, problems arise. You see companies start to produce thousands of products for customers they’ve never met, sold by salespeople they don’t know, built by people they’ve never talked to. Communication was easy when goods were produced in small quantities by hand, but that easy communication was lost as the world shifted to mass production by machines.
This was the exact problem in my product lesson on toothpaste before Dr. Sheffield added the mint and satisfaction. Toothpaste was mass-produced in jars as a chalky powder that the whole family shared. It was nasty and unpopular. But history ripples: you see the same problem today, with many products that leave you wondering, “Does anyone want this? Did they talk to a single user before making thousands of these?”
Why did PM2 succeed in product management? He effectively communicated his customers’ needs and translated all of the inter-departmental knowledge required to make the best product for the customer.
The problem is that technology expands our customer reach and, therefore, reduces our customer communication. Technology expands our knowledge but also widens the knowledge gaps between teams, reducing communication within an organization.
That is why the need for product management will grow as technology advances continue to distance us from the customer and increase the knowledge gaps between team members. This theme will continue to ripple in history.
1931 Brand Men
That brings us to the book Product Leadership by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw, which gives a fantastic overview of modern-day product management and inspired this post and video. The authors of the book state and everyone agrees, that modern product management comes from a memo written in 1931 at P&G. Neil H. McElroy wrote the 800-word memo that outlined the need for “brand men,” or what would become known as a product manager.
McElroy was frustrated while advertising Camay soap at P&G. He couldn’t figure out why the brand was losing to P&G’s flagship soap, Ivory. It was the same communication problem that formed in all mass production.
You had the expansion of all these manufacturing roles, yet nobody knew why the customers at “local stores” weren’t buying Camay. Somebody needed to go “personally to the consumer” and ask, what is it about Ivory soap that’s better? Is it the smell? The texture? The text on the package?
You had executives busy managing multiple products, but who was entirely responsible for Camay? Nobody. This wasn’t about “criticizing” Camay soap. It was about learning everything about the brand and taking responsibility. “Experiment” with every team involved and follow the entire production process with sales “right to the very finish.” Get to the local stores and talk to customers “in order to find out the trouble.”
The memo is so good. It instills that someone must be responsible for communicating the voice of the customer throughout the entire production process, all while working with and communicating with various teams so they can focus on their jobs.
Camay became an iconic top-selling soap brand—I think it’s dead now; product management is hard—and Procter & Gamble moved beyond soap to become one of the most successful, longest-lasting companies in the history of the world.
1943-1993 HP PMs
McElroy later helped found a small startup called NASA, and he also advised two young men at Stanford named Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Their company, HP, went on to sustain 50 years of unbroken 20% year-over-year growth between 1943 and 1993. In this period, the world faced WW2, multiple recessions, and stagflation in the 1970s, and yet, according to the book The Hewlett-Packard Way, putting brand men as close as possible to the customer to make the product manager the voice of the customer, led HP to succeed while the rest of the world was in turmoil.
HP divided product groups into small self-sustaining organizations that developed, manufactured, and marketed products in one cohesive unit. Tiny teams = big communication. If a team had over 500 people, they would split it. These smaller, tighter units allowed specific products to be developed faster for a specific customer.
1948-1975 Toyota & Lean PM
Around this same time period, Toyota was perfecting its own version of this called Lean Manufacturing, where a chief engineer, a shusa, took on the role of the product manager to take full responsibility for a car with a small dedicated team.
Toyota took it a step further and looked at reducing all forms of waste in the production process, including physical waste from defective parts and any waste in the process.
Whereas the brand men were instructed to “experiment with and recommend wrapper revisions,” the Toyota shusa was explicitly instructed to identify any waste that “does not generate value for customers” and immediately experiment with ways to solve tiny problems before they turn into millions of issues for customers. Toyota’s principles transformed not only the standards of the car industry (cars were unreliable in the 1980s) but also improved manufacturing standards across industries. This is also the basis for The Lean Startup, which we’ll get to soon.
Through brand management and lean manufacturing, product management practices continued to develop around physical products in established markets, with tons of acronyms you’d learn in business school. But a new technology revolution would present new challenges. Communication problems expanded exponentially with technological advances, and the world was about to embark on a new technology era.
1980s Steve Jobs asks for a PM
The 1980s introduced the personal computer era, but it wasn’t like adding mint to chalky toothpaste or making an established product slightly more reliable. It was a whole new ball game.
You couldn’t study your brand history, as the brand men were instructed to do because it didn’t exist. You couldn’t talk to current customers because you didn’t even know who your customer was. Heck, you don’t even know the technology your team is capable of because they were literally inventing the future in their minds. The personal computer era would present the need for a new era of brand men.
In the video, we see this struggle play out in 1986, with a frustrated Steve Jobs and the team at NeXT.
“… so somebody's got to say here's what we can do and we can make it happen and here's the level of thing we can ship in 16 months…”
That was Steve Jobs talking about the need for… a product manager! They couldn’t name the role at the time, but the team knew something was missing.
The PBS documentary is fascinating. It shows the team’s struggle to launch the next generation of computers, and blame gets aimed at Marketing, Sales, or Engineering. They need someone to communicate with everyone, “This is what we are building, here’s our priorities, and here’s our deadline.”
1984 Microsoft’s first PM
In the 1980s and 90’s, the role of product manager began to emerge with different names, other than “it’s not my job” or it “should be his job.” After all, someone must manage the product, whether the company makes it an official title or not.
Microsoft originally called the job Program Manager. In the book One Strategy, Jabe Blumenthal described how it happened:
“In early 1984, we began to work on a spread sheet for the Mac. I got involved and became a sort of service organization for the development group. I helped document the specifications, do the manual reviews, and decide what bug fixes were important and what could be postponed to a later release. While I didn't make the design decisions, I made sure that they got made. The process worked out really well, so they decided to call it something and institutionalize it.®”
Microsoft called it Program Manager, a job title that blurred the lines between project, program, and product manager over the decades to follow. Today, Microsoft also has product managers, but the lines between all of these jobs are blurred depending on the company you are at. So, it’s difficult to say who the first product manager was because the role carries many names. But whatever you call it, someone was doing the job.
1990s PMs
Then came the Internet, marking the beginning of the next era of technology and a new era of product manager, with the official title of “product manager” emerging around 1999. The history is murky, but you have examples like Kate Arnold, the first product manager at Netflix in 1999.
Then you have Marissa Mayer, Google’s first female engineer in 1999, who took on product manager roles and became the first product manager at Google in 2001.
Just a year later, in 2002, Mayer started the Associate Product Manager program at Google, a pivotal moment for the product manager profession in many ways. It was a shift away from brand men marketers to an engineering necessity. The waterfall method was over, where a boss would write a long list of specs, toss it over to engineering to build, and hope their customers enjoy their toothpaste or Windows 2000 CD-ROM. The Internet was here, and it was not static. Could you imagine if Google stopped their algorithm updates in 2000? No, software updates were being released rapidly to millions of customers. Once again, technological advances increased communication problems exponentially until they broke the system.
2001 & The Agile Manifesto
So, in 2001, 17 software engineers got together in a ski resort and wrote the Agile Manifesto. They took what they had learned from Scrum, DSDM, XP, and the learnings from Toyota to pen this manifesto:
We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
As we saw with the brand men memo in 1931, with technology moving us further away from the customer, we had to refocus on customer collaboration. Things were moving too fast. It wasn’t that a plan was no longer necessary; it was that responding to change became more important.
Engineers could no longer follow orders from a boss who didn’t understand their technology. To truly innovate in this fast-paced technology era, engineering and product would need to work together to experiment and learn about their customer’s needs before they build their final product. Remember, they were no longer building a better computer; they were building new technology for entirely new markets. They had to learn who their customer was before shipping their final product.
Agile created a harmonious atmosphere of collaboration, where product and engineering no longer fight, and customers are now delivered perfect products. (Sometimes… 😜)
2011 The Lean Startup
The Lean Startup built upon all of this in 2011. It focused the entire company, not just a product, on learning what the customer wants through rapid experimentation, shorter sprints, continuous improvement, communication, and customer focus—history ripples.
2024, Product Managers Today
As technology has increased our distance from customers, the number of product managers on LinkedIn has grown to over a million.
We now have Chief Product Officers, a name far above the title “it should be your job.”
You can now attend Carnegie Mellon for a Master of Science in Product Management.
Now, some people say AI will kill product management, but I say product management is the last job that will connect the human experience to technology. AI will help create millions of new products, product managers will need to manage those, and when AI can do that, it’s game over for humans anyways. 🤷🏻♀️
And there’s a really important reason that product managers will be the last job on earth, and that is this: I sell product manager courses at the Academy of Product Management. I’m bullish on PMs having a long future ahead. 😉
You got this!
If you’re looking for more product management lessons, here’s how I can help!
📚 Product Management Foundations course. My 9-week training program will set a strong foundation for your product career. This is a self-paced course with optional 1-on-1 sessions with me.
📺 PM Crash Course (free). A fun, free playlist of videos to introduce you to the basics of product management.
📖 Product Influence course. Learn simple influence principles and frameworks to take your product career to the next level.
🙋🏻♀️ 1-on-1 coaching. Book a 1-on-1 call with me for personalized coaching. You can also book time with me on Skillshare!
Referenced in this post:
Product Leadership by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, Nate Walkingshaw (O’Reilly)
The history and evolution of product management by Martin Eriksson (Mind the Product)
PDF of Neil McElroy's 1931 Brand Man Memo (Wikimedia Commons)
Great Moments In Branding: Neil McElroy Memo by Derrick Daye (Branding Strategy Insider)
Entrepreneurs, 1986 PBS documentary featuring NeXT and Steve Jobs (IMDB)
One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making by Steven Sinofsky and Marco Iansiti
When they hired their first PM by Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny’s Newsletter)
Lean Startup in 13 Hot Takes (Academy of PM)