Back in the 4th century BC, Plato outlined the product management role when stated, that to shape a high-quality product free of surprises, you need a help of a visionary. So, when a Greek stonemason was carving a pilaster, he wouldn’t just make it up themselves. He’d use a very well-thought-through template possessed by a master.
Archimedes, a dude who measured the volume of irregular objects while having a bath, applied empirical scientific principles that opened the way for some product development approaches that one day would be called Agile.
Product management took its shape as a profession very recently. Technologies and tools, products and servic`es we're dealing with appeared in the last decades. But a set of principles that lead the project to success were about the same during the whole human history.
So why don’t we reveal who we are as product managers, where we come from, and where we are potentially heading? Especially given that the history of product management is full of some of the most fascinating stories ever told, including ups and downs, soap ads and ski resorts, slow manufacturing and fast horses.
Henry Ford and fast horses
Henry Ford is one of the best businesspeople of the Industrial Age. He revolutionized mass production with an assembly line and started a 40-hour work week. But the real glory Mr. Ford got for his infamous quote that often gets thrown at product and user research people as a reason to ignore end-users:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
The earliest known linkage between the horse saying and Henry Ford appeared in “The Cruise Industry News Quarterly” in 1999, which is a little bit after Ford died (1947).
Do you know what Mr. Ford said?
If there is one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
Henry Ford could never tell that thing about horses because he knew that user-centricity is the only secret to success. And that user research is not about asking people what they want, it’s about watching what they do. And that horse poop on streets was a much more important issue than horse speed.
The Toyota Way and lean manufacturing
Kiichiro Toyoda, a humble Japanese entrepreneur, once traveled to the US to learn from Ford’s excellence. Toyoda was impressed by the scale of operation, but knew that in cash-strapped post-war Japan he didn’t have enough resources to supply manufacturing lines by stockpiling huge quantities of materials nearby.
What they also didn’t have in post-war Japan were supermarkets. A visit to Piggly Wiggly had an even stronger effect on Toyoda than a Ford factory. The businessman was impressed by the way the supermarket kept track of the thousands of items. Stockers were circulated around and replaced the items that customers removed. This way, shelves were never empty nor overloaded.
When he returned to Japan, Toyoda turned his inspiration into a famous Lean Manufacturing system, that itself will inspire the Lean Startup methodology half a century later.
Kanban boards, by the way, also trace their roots to the factories of Kiichiro Toyoda.
Camay soap as fairy godmother of PM and brand management
Just like Aphrodite, PM as a position was born out of foam.
To see how it happened, we’ll need to get back to May 13, 1931, when Neil McElroy, an athletic young Procter & Gamble marketing manager got frustrated working on a campaign for Camay soap. Because he had to compete with Ivory, another P&G soap.
McElroy came up with a solution — he invented the first product-centric position, which became known as “The Brand Man”. McElroy offered P&G to hire people in charge of each individual brand from top to bottom, as if they were separate businesses. This way, products could target different markets, develop distinguishing qualities, and become less competitive with each other.
Neil McElroy was a very promising young man. No wonder he made a stellar career in P&G, then became Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, and even helped to found NASA. But right now, we're more curious about the episode when Mr. McElroy was an advisor at Stanford and mentored two guys called Bill Hewlett and David Packard.
The HP Way and product management process
Bill Hewlett and David Packard found HP in 1939. They used a coin toss to decide between “Hewlett-Packard” or “Packard-Hewlett”.
Influenced by the ideas of Neil McElroy, they brought proto-product management principles to Silicon Valley. Over the years, via a series of videotapes recorded at HP’s video studios, the company trained thousands of product managers to make decisions as close to the customer as possible.
The training program resulted in HP growing 20% a year for 50 years and HP’s product managers being welcome guests in other startups, spreading the way product management is done worldwide. The title was “Product Marketing Manager” at the time, but it won't be for long.
Intuit and the first digital product management
Some dark night in 1983 Scott Cook, a former P&G brand man watched his wife struggling to balance the family checkbook. He thought it must be another way, and came up with the idea of Quicken, the software intended to change the overcomplicated world of personal finance.
Being founded by a product manager, Intuit became the first software company to adopt a Product Manager role. It also became a pioneer in user experience research long before Don Norman coined this term.
Since the company’s early days Scott Cook used to hang around a local Staples store waiting for someone to buy an Intuit product, and then ask a customer if he could follow them home and watch how they open and launch the software.
This (apparently not creepy) practice became famous as “Follow Me Home”.
Microsoft and modern product management
Back in the time when software required floppy disk drives, the Excel product teams went on customer visits, following Intuit’s idea, to see how customers were actually using their software.
And they didn’t see any people using their powerful financial modeling app to make calculations. Most Excel users never entered a formula. They just used Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.
It turned out that all the team assumptions were wrong. Not calculations, but gridlines were the most important Excel feature. It also turned out that engineers alone couldn’t both meet technical requirements and hear the voice of the customer.
There was a need for someone to see the big picture, to be the translator between a user and a tech team. Modern product management, that was gluing together business, UX and tech, was no longer a choice but a necessity in a tech world.
Steve Jobs at the top of PM game
After Microsoft’s Windows 95 release, Apple Inc. was in a death spiral. BusinessWeek predicted “The Fall of an American Icon” on its cover. In September 1997, when Apple was two months from bankruptcy, Steve Jobs agreed to return to save the company.
Jobs cut Apple back to a core that could survive, but in 1998 Apple still had less than 4 percent of the personal computer market. Jobs said he’s “going to wait for the next big thing.”
That worked, first, with the iPod, and, after that, with the iPhone. When a new window of opportunity opened — due to some change in demand or technology — Steve Jobs knew how to be the first one to pounce on it with a new product.
In the “Steve Jobs” movie, there is an intense scene where Steve Wozniak asks Jobs:
What do you do? You’re not an engineer, you’re not a programmer, you can’t design anything. What do you actually do?
A mysterious thing Jobs was doing can be called top-notch product management — Microsoft’s “big picture viewing”, fine-tuned to perfection.
Google’s APM program and product management education
After accidentally becoming Google’s first Product Manager, Marissa Mayer struggled to hire other product managers.
On one hand, experienced PM’s from Microsoft, for instance, or those with MBAs didn’t fit the team’s culture. On the other hand, hiring someone who has developed a product plan only in theory, sounded like a joke to Marissa.
So she came up with the idea to hire fresh computer science graduates and train them into what Google believes is modern Product Manager. Marissa Mayer created an Associate Product Manager (APM) program that was a huge success.
Take the first APM, Brian Rakowski, who built the Chrome browser, as an example. Next was Wesley Chan, who launched Google Analytics. Bret Taylor, another early APM, gave the world Google Maps.
APM programs started to pop up in all leading tech companies, from Facebook to Uber. Today APM is one of the most popular ways to get into the profession.
Agile Manifesto changes the software game
In February 2001, 17 representatives of different software backgrounds got together to spend a weekend in the Snowbird ski resort, surrounded by food, wine and frustration.
Iterative and incremental software development methods have been around for decades, but the sequential Waterfall approach was still the most sought, even though:
- It maximized risks because it assumed taking big decisions up-front when you know the least.
- It minimized the quality because tough deadlines forced people to make shortcuts.
- It suppresses teams’ creative potential. Product designers and developers who work on the frontline were the best sources of innovation, but they haven’t been even invited to the decision-making party.
The common frustration of the Snowbird 17 has evolved into the Agile Manifesto, the document composed of mysterious philosophical statements that brought epic subsequent changes in the tech world. In the short term, numerous techniques emerged to implement the “flexible” development methodology.The Lean Startup transforms product management conceptsAt about the time when Snowbird 17 were racking their brains around the poor tech industry standards, Eric Ries suffered from those standards. He was one of those engineers constantly building things that nobody wanted.
Eric knew about Toyota’s lean manufacturing methodology, which was called to increase the value and decrease waste in the production process. Eric also knew that one of the worst of waste you can imagine is designing, developing and testing a product just to throw thousands of lines of code away.So when Eric started his own company, he adapted lean thinking to software realities that led to the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) — the smallest version of a product you can use to start the process of learning from customers. In 2011, Eric Ries would set out his methodology in the legendary book The Lean Startup.Lean and Agile are not silver bullets that guarantee product success. But they made for digital products what Ford and Toyota made for manufacturing. As Marty Cagan says, “Both [Lean and Agile core principles] represent meaningful progress, and I would never want to go backward on those two fronts.”Marty Cagan and the Product Manager’s deskbook
The story you’ve read proves that product management history is an elusive matter. The job has always been around but in different forms. It had hundreds of names except “product management,” so we had to look for its signs on the landscape.So it would be fair to finish our story with the book that finally connected all the dots about how the mysterious product management job is done. Please welcome Marty Cagan’s Inspired, a bible for the industry since its first edition was published in 2008, and the favorite product management book of Ilya, Eleken’s founder.
- Read Inspired, if you wondering whether product management is the right career choice for you.
- Read it thoroughly if you are a new PM — this book packs years of experience into 250 pages.
- Read it also, if you are a seasoned PM — it will make you realize that you have the best job in the world and can have an incredible impact.
Wrapping up history and evolution of product managementA product manager is a new dream job right now — not least through Marty Cagan’s inspiring Inspired. According to Wall Street Journal, a product management 101 course at Harward Business School gets 2 to 3 times more applicants than available seats.All the fuss is because HBS students don’t know the best ways to land a PM job. We know because we studied the career paths of actual product managers. If you want to be initiated into the mysteries hidden from HBS students, read Eleken’s article on how to become a product manager.
