Evolution of Product management function

As the tech industry evolves in the post-pandemic era, product teams are adopting more agile and flexible structures to enable faster decision-making and align with cohesive product strategies. These models reflect the collaborative spirit of founding teams, marked by leaner hierarchies, fewer silos, and greater individual empowerment.

This shift empowers individuals to transcend traditional function boundaries, leveraging technology to contribute beyond their core area of expertise. It fosters radical self-sufficiency and amplifies individual impact.

Every organizational function is going through transformation, and product management is no exception. The boundaries between product management and other functions like design and engineering are increasingly blurring, much like how automation unified development, operations, and QA couple of years ago. Historically, they were distinct functions with rigid roles and engagement structures, but automation enabled teams to break down those silos and radically reshape how they work. Using QA as an example, the function hasn’t disappeared (and it can’t) but has dramatically evolved. Responsibilities were absorbed by development teams and supported by full automation, enabling more effective and scalable QA practices while maintaining its critical importance.

It's becoming hard to envision modern teams without a seamless integration of product management, design, and engineering, where individuals increasingly take on responsibilities across all three functions, leveraging automation to unlock new levels of efficiency, productivity, and scale. Whether growth is product-led or sales-led, eliminating artificial functional silos can be beneficial. However, the impact is likely to be more significant in product-led growth organizations.

What will product management look like in the next 5-10 years? Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but staying attuned to emerging trends, experimenting with new team structures, and being aware of where companies are finding success can help you adapt and prepare for what lies ahead.

The Product Management function

As a product manager, your role typically encompasses one of two key areas, or a dynamic blend of both:

• Pioneering Innovation: Typically product-led growth, where you spearhead the development of transformative, high-risk, high-reward products that define the company's future direction. It's about embracing the unknown, navigating ambiguity, and forging a path that delivers significant impact.
• Driving Continuous Improvement: Typically sales-led growth, where you manage feature backlogs, add functionality, optimize existing products, and ensure they consistently meet customer needs and deliver sustainable business value. It's about meticulous execution, iterative refinement, and evolving a product for enduring success.

The emphasis on each area varies significantly, influenced by several factors. Startups, driven by rapid growth, often prioritize execution, while established organizations may lean towards optimizing existing products. Companies pursuing disruptive growth strategies will likely emphasize innovation, whereas those prioritizing market share and profitability may focus more on optimization. Within the organization, senior product managers may focus more on strategic innovation, while those still learning the ropes may emphasize tactical execution and improvement. Finally, organizational culture plays a crucial role. Agile, innovation-driven cultures encourage experimentation, while more structured environments may prioritize stability and adherence to established processes.

If you are in a product manager function, and whatever your responsibilities are, you likely rely on other functions within your organization such as design, development, and data science/analytics to achieve your product goals. The degree of reliance on each function depends on factors like the nature of your product, the tools available to enhance your own self-sufficiency, and the level of collaboration within your organization.

Any misalignment with these functions whether due to conflicting priorities, mismatched timelines, lack of skill sets, or limited influence can significantly hinder your ability to achieve your objectives and the impactful outcomes.

From a product development standpoint, even the most well-organized and well-intentioned functions within an organization can become sources of friction. Misaligned goals, competing priorities, and organizational silos can slow down innovation, stifle creativity, and reduce the efficiency of delivering impactful products.

Bureaucracy, politics, and excessive processes often lead to decisions that prioritize the interests of specific functions and result in point features, rather than focusing on what’s best for the product or the company as a whole.

Startup founders in particular, often reflect nostalgically on the early days of their journey, when product development was fast, collaborative, and closely aligned with the company’s goal to innovate and disrupt. Small, cross-functional teams worked seamlessly together, free from the bottlenecks created by layers of approvals and rigid workflows. As organizations grow, however, the introduction of additional layers and processes can lead to a deviation from this ethos. The result is slower product cycles, diluted innovation, and outcomes that fail to align with the original vision or deliver maximum value to customers.

Here’s a typical workflow for the product management function within an organization and the various functions it interacts with at different stages. While the specifics may vary from company to company, the key takeaway is that product management is deeply dependent on multiple functions to deliver results.

The journey from product vision or new feature concept to product viability (yellow star in the picture) decision-making for GA - general availability, requires PM function to work and iterate with let's say 7-10 engineers, 1-2 UX designers, 1? data analyst, and, if you’re fortunate, 1 TPM - technical program manager. In addition, PM function is expected to closely collaborate with Marketing, Sales, and Executives, navigating their inputs and expectations while remaining the go-to person for sharp, well-informed answers on product strategy, competitive positioning, and the roadmap.

The PM function requires balancing high-leverage, high-impact tasks that drive company wide results with essential "keep the lights on" activities. However, when too much time is spent on incremental updates due to team structure and culture, it creates an opportunity cost and fosters an environment that prioritizes creating a feature assembly line over taking bold, high-reward risks.

Another side effect I’ve observed in a feature assembly-line-driven culture is that features are often designed to optimize specific metrics or KPIs rather than contributing to a cohesive, cross-functional strategy. This can result in clunky, disjointed product experiences that feel poorly presented from the user’s perspective. For example, in one project, we focused heavily on optimizing recommendations to boost engagement metrics in a specific part of the funnel. However, this over-optimization introduced friction in a later stage of the journey, frustrating users and causing drop-offs. As a result, there was a net loss in users completing the overall journey, a failure from a product standpoint.

In hindsight, such issues might seem easy to avoid and obvious. But when you're deep in execution, pushing features without aligning them to a broader product strategy and end-to-end flow, these missteps can become all too common.

If you are in a product manager function, but your time is primarily spent shipping incremental features, making product enhancements, and coordinating stakeholders, you may be functioning more as a project manager rather than focusing on driving transformative product innovation. It is also important to go a step further and constantly evaluate whether the product management function is the right fit for a given context and set of stakeholders. This is particularly relevant when building products for internal teams, such as engineering teams, to improve their efficiency and productivity. In such cases, the product management function can become significantly distorted and misaligned with first principles. Since these internal products are created by engineers for engineers, it’s essential to critically assess whether product management is truly adding value. A deliberate approach is needed to operationalize the function effectively, ensuring it goes beyond merely collecting requests and acting as an intermediary between teams. Without this clarity, product management risks being reduced to project management disguised as product management.

It’s no surprise that, in many companies, the day-to-day responsibilities of product management function often shift from focusing on product strategy and delivering outcomes to more of a feature delivery or project management role.

The (new) Product Management function

With the meteoric rise of AI tools and copilots, the flattening of organizational hierarchies, and the breakdown of functional silos, there’s a growing opportunity to blur the lines between product management, design, and engineering.

The greatest potential is realized when people, technology, and functions are purposefully interconnected, unleashing the full potential of individuals to transcend organizational hierarchies and boundaries - where an individual's impact is determined not by existing structures and processes, but by their own ambition and drive.

In this new paradigm, people in the product management function can carry the torch of their product vision much further, potentially reaching the viability stage without heavy reliance on design, engineering, or data teams. Once a product reaches viability and a GA decision is made, design and development teams can step in to build, scale, and roll out the product. This ensures the product meets user needs, aligns with leadership priorities, and adheres to the overarching vision and strategy.

In this model, product management becomes fully equipped and empowered to deliver small, incremental features directly to end users as well as test hypotheses for big bets, eliminating?dependencies on other functions while accelerating delivery.

Here is the new workflow for the product management function that eliminates dependencies on various functions until at a much later time when the product idea is ready to be productized.

Now, you might wonder, “Wait a minute, is product manager function expected to develop expertise in all these domains?” The short answer is NO. A product manager doesn't need to master the craft or develop expertise in design, data science, or engineering. Instead, leveraging AI tools allows them to tackle tasks beyond their core expertise, streamline workflows, and drastically reduce coordination overhead. Developing a broad skill set, supported by technology, turns you into a self-sufficient generalist, a superpower that accelerates the exploration, validation, and iteration of ideas. It also shifts the cultural mindset from a "feature assembly line" to a "product laboratory".

Imagine the freedom to independently tweak a UX element for A/B testing, launch small-scale experiments to validate hypotheses with select customers, analyze raw data to uncover meaningful patterns without relying on a data team, or even draft comprehensive PRDs simply by conversing with a LLM.

For instance, consider receiving a data dump of all customer reviews. AI tools can rapidly categorize, summarize, and identify trends within this data. This eliminates the need to prioritize and then wait for the data team to execute complex ETLs, create data pipelines, and write transformations before even basic analysis can begin. While the initial insights may not be perfect, they provide valuable directional guidance to make progress. I have come across many teams and leaders who are overly reliant on data, treating it as a GPS rather than a compass. While data plays a critical role in guiding decisions, it is your organizational strategy and intuition that help you identify the right fork in the road to take. Data can assist you in navigating the journey, and AI tools can turbocharge your progress.

In another scenario, you might want to rapidly launch a minimal viable feature to test a hypothesis with a closed set of users who are friendly, forgiving, adventurous, and willing to provide valuable feedback. Engaging with users early through hands-on experience, rather than solely relying on concept decks and surveys, allows you to gather critical insights, refine the product based on their feedback, and establish product-market fit before involving larger design and development teams. This approach can significantly streamline the development process, as the design and engineering teams will have a clearer understanding of user needs and a more refined product direction from the outset. I can bet they will have deep appreciation of the work done so far, rather than starting with a PRD document and an unproven hypothesis.

Using AI, and particularly LLMs, can significantly enhance the development of your product roadmap by reducing availability and confirmation bias. Imagine you're working on a product with widespread adoption that provides tremendous value to customers and receives a large volume of reviews across multiple social media platforms and channels. As a product leader, you obsess over user feedback, especially from detractors. By collecting these reviews, which can be multi-modal in nature (text, screenshots, video), you can use LLM to quickly summarize pain points, identify patterns, and prioritize features to develop. You can prompt the LLM with questions like, "Can you suggest an inbound demand generation strategy based on reviews?" or “Given these comments and the current roadmap, what refinements would you suggest?” or "Can you summarize the top 3 pain points in the customer journey?" This gives you a powerful tool to generate insights, brainstorm new ideas, and continuously refine your strategy roadmap, all without relying on other teams to drive the process. And the best part? You can do it at scale. Of course, you might need a Mac upgrade for all that processing power when working on an airplane. :-)

Furthermore, AI tools can automate routine operational tasks that often consume a significant portion of a product manager's time. This includes tasks such as backlog prioritization, generating user stories, drafting PRDs, taking notes, and analyzing feedback. By automating these tasks, AI can accelerate workflows and improve the quality of output, enabling product managers to focus on impactful product outcomes rather than tactical operational tasks.

I call the approach the rise of Founder Function within an organization, which is a blend of design, product management, and engineering. Founder Function breaks down functional silos and allows individuals to work across design, product management, and engineering supported by AI tools.

The approach is reminiscent of early stages of a startup, where founders operate as generalists, often wearing multiple hats to take their idea to a viability stage, and then look for help to scale or bring in specialists to take it to the next level.

Closing Thoughts

It will be fascinating to see how product function evolves and what AI tools will become indispensable to allow product function to go back to the first principles, i.e.,

a. focus on hard problems to solve that align with organization strategy

b. measure success through product outcomes not number of features shipped

c. deeply understand your users, customers, and the market

d. deliver value to your users and delight them

e. build awesome products that contribute significantly to organizational growth

And if you’ve made it this far but are still skeptical about your career choice or the effort required in working horizontally across functions to get things done (rather than specializing in one area), I would leave you with a book recommendation. In his New York Times bestseller, Range WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH IN A SPECIALIZED WORLD, David Epstein makes a compelling case that the future may belong to generalists. These individuals may have depth in their area of expertise, but they also possess breadth across multiple domains.