Product Management - Title vs. Function
The field of Product Management has always been challenged to define itself and its value – but this has greatly intensified in the age of AI. As an example, searches for “what do product managers do” increased by a whopping 400% from 2020 to 2025, which is four times the increase from the preceding five years (2015-2020)!
What our field – and the world, perhaps – need to understand is that there are two important and separable facets of PdM: the title and the function. As a business owner or leader, you might convince yourself that you don’t need a “product manager” (title), but let us be clear: you need someone doing product management!
Why? Because someone needs to:
- Identify the customer problems to solve, jobs to do, and unmet or undeserved needs (pick your framework) to address.
- Determine what products (whether widgets, services, or software) you should and shouldn’t make based on your business’s strategy and customer base(s).
- Collect customer and market data for insights that inform future plans and strategy.
- Interface with the other business functions – Development, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance and more – to act on these insights in bringing product to market; to “commercialize” the product.
Regardless of whether the person or people hold the title of “Product Manager” or “Product Team”, if they do this, they are acting as the product manager! In early-stage startups, this role may be handled by the Founder and/or CEO. In small businesses, it may be handled by a single person (or even a high-level Engineer). In larger businesses, it may be a dedicated function and team. But regardless, the function of product management needs to be fulfilled at every level of business maturity.
Product Management At Different Scales
As we’ve previously written, a product manager needs to product manage themselves – that is, assess the unmet needs of the business (as their customer) first and tailor their role and focus to address those needs. But what if you aren’t even hired yet? Do you pitch yourself as a ‘product manager’?
The answer is…sometimes. If a business is an early-stage startup, it is unlikely that you will be able to sell them on a dedicated Product Management role. Instead, you may need to pitch yourself as a hybrid role which combines product management and adjacent functions in order to relieve pressure on the founder – one of the fundamental needs of the business at that point.
Here is a sampling of key business needs at various company stages and sizes:
As you can see, both the function and embodiment of Product management varies greatly as company size and maturity scales. The most familiar version is likely at or above 50-200 employees, but doesn’t help you if you are interviewing at a Series A startup. You need to tailor which capabilities you pitch based on where the company is – and in an early-stage startup, this might mean that the “product manager” acts more as a chief of staff for the founder, capturing the rationalization and thinking, decisions, etc. from the founder to execute with the larger team. The company already has their Product Manager; it’s the Founder – but as it grows, eventually the Founder will need to focus on other areas, providing you the opportunity to develop Product Management as a discrete function.
By Any Other Name
In addition to leading a Product group, I have performed “product management” from within Sales, Engineering and Marketing, and often with titles that did not suggest Product Management at all! Nonetheless, I was doing what I enjoyed and what the company ultimately needed – product management.
There is, of course, something to be said for the story that your resume tells, and so it is important to be mindful about titles that actually undermine your credibility (i.e. I would not suggest accepting a role called, “Chief Bottle Washer”, no matter what the function is. Yes, I have seen this!).
The key point is to focus first on the match between the business’s needs and your capabilities, and not on the title of the position. Constraining your search and pitch by title will limit your opportunities to larger companies where the Product Management function is established and roles are more narrowly defined, and this is a fraction of the opportunity.
So open up those search terms a bit – you may be surprised where you end up as a ‘product manager’!
About the Author:
Adam Shulman is a Product Management and Engineering leader with extensive experience in software/hardware systems and a passion for music and audio technology. He currently leads Product Management at Bose Professional and is Co-President of the BPMA.
