Thinking Again About the Job Title "Product Manager"

Good morning, it’s まさきん.

I’ve been hearing the title “product manager” come up as a topic on tech podcasts lately.

Riding that wave, I went and picked up a product management book of my own: The Book for Becoming a Product Manager Who Competes Globally. It’s a feeling close to what I had after reading Competing on Analytics a while back — but as I read, something kept nagging at the back of my mind the whole time.

Come to think of it, this isn’t the first time I’ve turned something like this over in my head. Long before now, I’d already thought this same topic through in my own way. My take back then was a pretty simple one: isn’t this just a new name for a job that’s always existed?

Is Product Manager Really a New Role?

The title “product manager” tends to get talked about as a recent invention. Personally, though, I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

Deciding what to build, setting priorities, finding the balance between what users want and what the business needs — that job itself must have existed for a long time.

Japanese companies have had similar roles too, under names like director, editor-in-chief, or planning lead. Haven’t they been doing much the same thing all along? A magazine’s editor-in-chief has always decided what to feature and what to cut. A TV director has always judged what to prioritize within a limited runtime.

It feels like only the title has changed, while the basic shape of the work hasn’t moved all that much.

Prioritizing your phone bill probably starts the same way — by first turning the current situation into numbers.

A Role That Decides “Why,” Not “How”

That said, if you ask whether it’s exactly the same, something still feels off about that too. I do think the term “product manager” brought something new to the table.

The biggest thing is that it’s a position that moves across engineering, design, and the business side. Directors and editors-in-chief, by contrast, tended to operate within the bounds of a single production team.

A product manager, I think, often has to juggle technical constraints, design intent, and business numbers all at once. People often say that engineers and designers decide “how” to build something, while the product manager’s job is to decide “why” to build it.

That framing sits pretty well with me. The person who holds the reason to build something, not the method for building it. Looked at that way, I think jobs with a similar function — just under different names — have existed in all kinds of workplaces for a long time.

Take, for example, a moment when a team is deciding whether to build a new feature. The engineer estimates the implementation cost, the designer thinks through usability, and the business side worries about the impact on revenue and churn.

When those three viewpoints collide, someone has to take on the final call. That, I think, is the product manager’s role — because it’s a situation no single person’s expertise alone can resolve.

What Became Easier to See Once the Title Changed

Even so, I think the change in name itself carries meaning. Once a role gets its own distinct name, it becomes clearer as a standard for hiring and evaluation.

The old titles — director, editor-in-chief — tended to make sense only within their own organization or industry. If you tried to move to a company in a completely different field, you had to re-explain, every single time, what you’d actually been doing.

The term “product manager” feels like it carved this role out into a shape that makes sense across industries. That’s probably exactly why more people started picking up books to learn about it systematically.

Once something has a name, the way of working that used to live only in one person’s head starts getting put into words, little by little. I genuinely think that trend, on its own, is a good thing.

Generative AI Is Changing the Day-to-Day Work

Looking back at myself thinking about this around 2015, the situation now looks a little different. That’s because generative AI has started changing the fine details of this job.

I’ve had AI draft the first pass of requirements documents more and more often. I can also have it read through a huge pile of app reviews or inquiries and sort out the underlying trends.

Retrospectives that used to take days of manual tallying by hand can now have a rough draft ready in a matter of minutes. I can also get several patterns of feature ideas or design options generated right away.

Comparisons that used to take days now feel like they wrap up in a matter of hours.

For example, I remember a time when opinions split over whether to change the placement of a certain button. Back then, just gathering everyone involved to talk it through took half a day on its own. Now, I can have AI generate several likely reactions up front and get straight into discussion using that as a starting point. It feels like the time saved on preparation has gone directly into more time for actual discussion.

That said, what AI increases is the number of options — not the reason for choosing one. The judgment of what to prioritize and what to let go of, I feel, still ends up resting with people.

I had a similar feeling when I wrote about data analysis work a while back. If that’s the case, I suspect the center of gravity of the product manager role will keep resting on the “why” part of the job going forward. The faster the pace of work gets, the more the weight of judgment itself seems to grow, if anything.

Wrap-up

Work is a continuous string of deciding what to do — and just as much, a continuous string of deciding what not to do. I think that same sense carries over directly into household finances.

For our own household spending, I try to think about reasons to cut back before reasons to add more. It’s less about what to give up, and more about working backward from what I actually want to protect.

The order of judgment I picked up at work seems to carry over into everyday decisions more than I would have expected. I think I’ll take some time to reconsider, once again, what’s actually worth spending money on.

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