A Brief History of Product Management

Ever wondered about the beginning of this most sought after ‘Product Manager’ role. How did it start and evolve? Here’s a brief history of product management:

1. FMCG industry takes credit for the birth of the Product Management discipline. History of product management goes way back to 1931 when the role of ‘Brand Men’ was conceptualized by Neil H McElroy of Procter & Gamble for managing products and its marketing mix

2. Later, McElroy, as an advisor at Stanford, influences young entrepreneurs Bill Hewlett and David Packard, who later go on to form the divisional structure of a product group at HP. Each product group is an autonomous, self-sustaining entity responsible for conceptualizing, producing and marketing its products. At HP, the product manager is considered as the voice of customers and their customer-centric approach helped them to set an unbroken 50-year growth record of 20% YoY from 1943 to 1993.

3. HP Product alumni adopt the successful lean manufacturing and continuous improvement principles of Toyota Production System, hence product management perspectives evolve to integrate customer-centricity, brand vertical and lean manufacturing. The success of product management groups at HP soon gets popular among many hardware and software product organizations in Silicon Valley.

4. 1970s: Technology companies realized that product management role in the technology domain is got to be different from FMCG where the product manager only owns the marketing mix (packaging, pricing, brand management, and promotions). Product development is key in the technology world. It is complicated, costly with a lot of investment in inventions and innovations, hence it needed customer perspectives to be deeply infused in this process. This led to the alignment of the product management role with the product development process.

5. 1980s: Intuit’s founder Scott Cook who was a former ‘brand man’ at Procter & Gamble, starts incorporating ‘brand management’ principles to its first software product, Quicken. Quicken, although a finance software, was aimed for home users and non-financial users. Scott’s deep customer empathy and obsession to solve the customer problems led to the ‘Follow me home’ program where the product team was involved in studying how customers use the product in a real-life situation. Thus, Intuit gets the credit to be first among the software companies to adopt the role of product management.

6. 1990s: Microsoft also follows this movement, like Intuit, of adopting product management principles into a role of what it called ‘Program Management’. This started when Microsoft got into developing Excel for Macintosh. Program managers were responsible for understanding customer needs, identify product/feature requirements and then translate them to technical/software requirements that would make sense for the engineers to develop the product.

7. 2000s-till date: Leading software companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. adopt product management principles as a dedicated practice that works closely with their engineering, design and business areas.

More readings and references:

1. https://www.mindtheproduct.com/history-evolution-product-management/

2. https://medium.com/pminsider/the-history-and-evolution-of-product-management-part-1-23cb7a858f05

3. https://medium.com/pminsider/the-history-and-evolution-of-product-management-part-2-9c987fdc4ac

4. https://medium.com/pminsider/the-history-and-evolution-of-product-management-part-3-c91698c889ca