Over 30 years, I’ve worked with dozens of companies, and the pattern is consistent.
Most executives don’t really understand Product Management.
And it’s not their job to.
They assume it’s requirements gathering.
Or backlog management.
Or just “keeping engineering on track.”
They think a PM is only needed once they fund an engineering team.
And, too often, they put Product Management under the CTO.
The CTO becomes the de facto head of product — an arrangement that almost always misses the mark. Because technology strategy and product strategy are not the same thing.
This isn’t their fault.
It’s ours — when we don’t define the role ourselves.
When PMs stay quiet, the role gets reduced to coordination.
When product leaders stay quiet, or fail to give their PMs opportunities to showcase their value, the role gets reduced to delivery management. To engineering babysitting.
And once that happens, it’s hard to climb back out.
The way forward is to anchor Product Management in business impact.
PMs need to do more than learn how features get shipped. We need to ground our role in the business.
To do that:
We need to understand how the business itself works.
We need to be the voice of the market and the strategy.
We need to identify monetizable opportunities that generate ROI for the business.
We need to talk about how our products create revenue and profit — not just outputs.
And we need to speak the language of MONEY — revenue, margin, retention.
We need to stop talking in terms of tasks, tools, and tech.
We need to connect product to profitable customer needs and business outcomes.
If you don’t define Product Management where you work, someone else will.
And they’ll get it wrong.
Have a joyful week, and, if you can, make it joyful for someone else too.
cheers,
shardul
Shardul Mehta
I ❤️ product managers
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