Have you ever paused to think about the first time you encountered Product Management?
My first time was around 2018. A friend working at a tech company casually mentioned their PM role. What they described, though, sounded unlike any job I knew; part strategist, part user advocate, part engineer whisperer. I remember thinking: Where did this role come from? And why did it feel so strangely essential, yet almost impossible to define?
That simple question stuck with me, and over time, the answer revealed itself in layers.
What I came to realize is that product management isn’t a static role. It’s a discipline that morphs with the world around it. It evolves with technology, adapts to how companies operate, and responds to changing user expectations. It’s moved from brand teams to engineering squads, from managing product lines to orchestrating entire digital ecosystems. Plus, the more the product terrain shifts, the more the role of the PM expands to meet it.
This Article traces that evolution. We’ll explore:
How a role created to manage soap brands laid the groundwork for digital product ownership.
How the rise of software in the 1990s forced PMs to trade advertising plans for product specs and taught them to work with ambiguity.
How the 2010s till today formalised product leadership, not through hierarchy, but through systems thinking, experimentation, and outcome-driven frameworks.
Lastly, we’ll explore where the role is heading now: into an era where PMs navigate intelligent systems, global teams, and product strategy as a business-critical function.
If you’re new to product or a product veteran leading teams, knowing how the role has evolved would help you make sense of what it demands today and what it just might require tomorrow.
Where It All Began.. (1930s–1980s)
In 1931, Neil McElroy, a junior advertising executive at Procter & Gamble, wrote a memo that would unknowingly plant the seeds for one of the most influential roles in modern business.
Faced with the challenge of managing multiple products within a growing brand portfolio, he proposed the idea of a “Brand Man”, someone who would be entirely responsible for the success of a single product line. That meant exploring customer insights, working across departments, managing ad campaigns, and owning the performance of the brand.
At the time, this idea was radical. Until then, products were often managed by committees or departments with fragmented ownership. The Brand Man changed that. For the first time, one person would be accountable for a product’s success in the market, not just its promotion, but its entire strategic direction.
This model quickly proved effective, and over the following decades, it spread to other consumer goods companies, (Unilever, General Foods, Johnson & Johnson), where it helped bring more discipline and customer focus to brand strategy.
Throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, the brand manager evolved into a key player in corporate strategy. They collaborated across functions, marketing, sales, finance, even R&D bringing a holistic view to product success. While they rarely engaged in the technical development of the product itself, they shaped what the product was in the eyes of the market.
They thought in positioning, pricing, packaging, and perception. And they had to get it right because once a product hit the shelf, there was no opportunity to iterate. Every product launch was a high-stakes, high-investment event. That’s why so much effort was placed on understanding users, a mindset that continues to influence modern PM thinking today.
By the 1980s, the Brand Man had become a fixture in global corporations. The role was respected, often feeding directly into executive leadership pipelines. But it was still tethered to its consumer marketing roots more about storytelling and market fit than building new products from scratch. The idea of cross-functional product ownership had taken root, but the digital tools, iterative methods, and technical depth we associate with product management today were still decades away.
Further down the line.. (1990s - 2000s)
The 1990s through the early 2000s marked a Critical chapter in the evolution of product management, one that required the role to break from its marketing-led past and adapt to the speed, scale, and ambiguity of the software age. As companies shifted from building physical goods to shipping digital products, product managers found themselves navigating uncharted territory. The work was no longer about positioning what had already been made, it was about deciding what should be built in the first place. And with no clear blueprint to follow, the discipline had to reinvent itself under pressure.
What followed was a period of experimentation, learning, and fundamental transformation reflected in several defining shifts:
The shift from physical to digital products changed everything. In traditional industries, the product was the object. But in the 1990s, as companies like Microsoft, Netscape, and Oracle led the software revolution, the product became something that lived on a screen, constantly changing, increasingly complex, and delivered via bits, not boxes. There was no packaging, no shelf space, and no long lead times. The old rules of brand management didn’t apply. What software companies needed was someone who could define what to build, prioritise functionality, and translate user needs into technical solutions. That person became the product manager, but in a form that looked nothing like their consumer goods predecessor.
Product managers were inventing their roles on the fly. The PMs of this era had no standard job description. At Microsoft, they were expected to write exhaustive PRDs, engage deeply with engineering, and act as “customer advocates with technical literacy.” At Intuit, PMs helped shape user flows while collaborating with marketing and support teams. In both cases, PMs were embedded across the lifecycle, from concept to release, but had to earn influence through clarity, cross-functional fluency, and a deep understanding of both users and systems.
Requirement documents and project plans gave way to iterative thinking. Much of the product work in the 1990s was still built on waterfall-style planning: gather requirements, write specs, build, test, launch. But as internet usage grew and development cycles tightened, companies began experimenting with more flexible approaches. The seeds of Agile and Lean thinking were planted. Product managers found themselves at the centre of this shift, balancing the rigour of long-term planning with the need for faster learning and more adaptive delivery models.
Customer insight started to come from behaviour, not just surveys. With the rise of internet-connected products, companies began collecting real user data at scale. For the first time, product managers could observe what users actually did, not just what they said. This was a profound shift. PMs moved from focusing solely on hypothetical personas to analysing real behaviour (page views, drop-offs, feature usage) which gave them a new, data-driven lens for prioritisation and product design.
The dot-com boom and bust revealed the consequences of poor product decisions. During the late 1990s tech boom, many startups burned cash building flashy but unsustainable products. When the bubble burst in the early 2000s, it exposed a hard truth: building fast wasn’t enough, you had to build something valuable, usable, and viable. This moment of reckoning underscored the need for more strategic, disciplined product thinking. It gave legitimacy to the idea that product management wasn’t just about shipping features, it was about delivering outcomes.
By the early 2000s, product management had become an essential, if still loosely defined, function within technology companies. PMs had learned to operate in ambiguity, translate between disciplines, and ground decisions in both user need and technical constraint. It was no longer a borrowed role from marketing, it was an emerging craft in its own right, setting the stage for the explosion of tools, methods, and specialisation that would follow in the next decade.
The Era of the Modern PM (2010s till Today)
The 2010s marked another turning point in the evolution of product management. What had previously been an emerging function within tech organisations matured into a central, high-leverage role. As digital products became the primary growth engines for companies, the expectations placed on PMs increased dramatically. No longer just owners of backlogs and feature sets, PMs became responsible for strategy, customer experience, and measurable business outcomes.
Here's how the modern PM role took shape:
The rise of agile and lean methodologies transformed how products were built and validated. The 2010s saw the widespread adoption of Agile frameworks and Lean Startup principles, which fundamentally changed the product development lifecycle. Rather than writing detailed specs and launching infrequent releases, product teams embraced continuous discovery, iterative delivery, and continuous experimentation. PMs began working in short sprints, shipping MVPs, testing assumptions with real users, and using live feedback to shape product direction. These practices placed a premium on speed, adaptability, and customer learning making product managers the connective thread between insight and execution.
Data became a cornerstone of modern product decision-making. With the rise of powerful analytics tools, PMs were expected to move beyond gut instinct and opinion. They were now responsible for defining success metrics, running A/B tests, interpreting behavioural data, and making evidence-based trade-offs. Tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and SQL became standard in the product manager’s toolkit. Yet, this data fluency came with a caution: the most effective PMs learned not to over-index on metrics alone, but to balance quantitative rigour with qualitative nuance, ensuring user insights and empathy remained central to decision-making.
Product management evolved from a team function to a strategic organisational pillar. As product teams scaled within growing companies, PMs were increasingly included in conversations about business strategy, growth planning, and customer lifecycle design. Product leadership gained seats at the executive table, often through newly established Chief Product Officer (CPO) or VP of Product roles. PMs weren’t just shipping what executives asked for, but helping define what the company should build next, how it should invest, and how product could drive competitive differentiation. This shift positioned product management as a critical lever for revenue, retention, and long-term business health.
New disciplines within product emerged to address increasing complexity. As some organisations scaled, the “one-size-fits-all” PM role began to fragment into specialised tracks. Growth PMs focused on acquisition, conversion, and retention. Platform and infrastructure PMs owned internal tools and system reliability. Technical PMs partnered closely with engineering on APIs, architecture, and developer tools. And Product Operations (Product Ops) emerged to drive process alignment, tool standardisation, and cross-team coordination. This specialisation reflected a larger truth: great product management now requires different shapes, not just more people.
Customer experience became the north star of product leadership. The best PMs of were not just expected to ship faster, they were thinking holistically. They cared deeply about user onboarding, end-to-end flows, accessibility, delight, and trust. They championed UX research, invested in usability, and asked not just “Can we build it?” but “Should we?” and “Will it meaningfully improve the user’s life?” As the competitive bar for digital products rose, so did the expectation that PMs be stewards of not just outcomes but of the entire customer experience ecosystem.
This Era cemented the modern product manager’s identity: a strategic, customer-obsessed, data-informed leader capable of aligning teams, driving business outcomes, and navigating uncertainty. It’s the foundation upon which today’s most effective PMs operate and the context that shapes where the discipline is heading next.
The Future of Product Management
Product management has always been about navigating change but what’s ahead won’t just require adaptability; it will demand reinvention. As products become more intelligent, interconnected, and business-critical, PMs are expected to be more technologically attuned than ever before. They are also being pulled deeper into strategy, systems thinking, and long-term value creation. The next generation of product leaders won’t just optimise features/products but shape how entire ecosystems evolve.
Here’s what the next wave of product management is beginning to look like:
Artificial Intelligence is becoming both a tool and a challenge for PMs. AI is no longer limited to backend automation or customer support bots, it’s starting to touch nearly every part of the product development lifecycle. Product managers are beginning to rely on AI to surface patterns in user feedback, optimise roadmaps, analyse product usage data, and even auto-generate draft specifications. This changes the day-to-day of product work dramatically, pushing PMs to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on strategic decision-making. At the same time, AI embedded within products introduces complex considerations around personalisation, ethics, explainability, and trust. Tomorrow’s PMs will need to understand not just how AI works, but how it shapes user expectations.
The PM skillset is expanding from well-rounded generalist to focused product strategist. As the role matures, companies are seeking PMs with sharper domain expertise, stronger product sense, and the ability to synthesise data, technology, and business context into clear strategy. Soft skills like storytelling, alignment, and decision-making under uncertainty are still critical—but they’re now complemented by the need for analytical fluency, systems thinking, and long-term vision. Increasingly, the most impactful product managers will be those who bring a clear point of view on the problem space, the market landscape, and the opportunity for innovation rather than simply managing a backlog of requests.
Distributed and remote-first teams are redefining product collaboration and leadership. The geographic boundaries of product teams have dissolved. Today’s product managers are working with engineers in Eastern Europe, designers in South America, and stakeholders spread across different time zones. This decentralisation brings in more diverse perspectives and accelerates global innovation but it also demands a new kind of leadership. PMs must be experts in asynchronous communication, cross-cultural collaboration, and managing ambiguity without relying on physical proximity or real-time alignment.
The Future of product management won’t be defined by tools or titles, but by the increasing weight of its influence. As technology evolves, organisations scale, and users expect more personalised, intelligent experiences, PMs will be called on to lead not just build. The next chapter of the role belongs to those who can operate across disciplines, think systemically, and relentlessly focus on outcomes that matter.
This is very comprehensive and easy to understand. I'd like to suggest, a breakdown of the abbreviations used so that beginners can follow easily without having to leave the page to search for what those abbreviations mean as it can interrupt reader experience.
Overall, this was a very educative read. You've gotten yourself a new subscriber 💖
Fabulous essay!