Past, present, and future of PMs (with some spicy opinions)

Everyone right now is trying to guess the future of PMs. Some claim, it’s the death of product management, which I disagree with. Although the change is undeniable, the pace differs from place to place.

Over the years, I’ve come across multiple variations of PMs. Some relate to how I started my journey almost two decades ago, and some more modern. But one thing is clear to me, every place has signs of past, present, and future.

I want to take you on a journey of how PMs are evolving, what belongs to the past, what’s still in the present, and what the future looks like. I invite you to read it attentively and bring your perspectives, share them, and we’ll all learn from each other. I don’t claim to know it all because I don’t. What I’m about to share relates to my observations across the product world.

Shall we begin?

What a heck is a product manager?

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes at this question now. Stick with me and you’ll get why this question matters.

I ask this question to all companies I work with. Curiously, I hardly ever got the same answer. Here are some common variations:

• The voice of the customer

• The one who owns the product strategy

• The bridge between business and tech

• The responsible for our roadmap execution

• The connection between business and customers

You probably have another particular variation to that. This is one of the aspects that complicate PMs’ lives. Nobody really agrees on what the job is all about.

Overall, some companies deploy PMs with limiting responsibilities to strategy, and no execution, others vice-versa. A few empower PMs with end to end responsibilities, which is what I encourage.

My definition is: The value maximiser, responsible for creating impact for the business and customers.

You’ve got to understand what success means in your case. Beyond that, don’t take the status quo as final because it isn’t. The role will go through a journey in any organization. And today, with AI adding pressure to the pot, leaders are more open to change than usually.

The PM journey: past, present, and future

Every company will have its own journey, and you may have your particular journey as well. Over the last years, I noticed a few approaches related to seven areas that shape the PM’s journey. The following table summarises them before we go in-depth.

Now, let me elaborate on each of them so you can reflect on your unique situation. Remember, I invite you to share your views on the comments, we all can learn from your perspectives.

#1 Business Understanding

When I first became a PM, business defined what we should deliver, and I bridged the communication between them and tech. I didn’t try understanding the business in-depth, I trusted them to make the right calls, and my responsibilities ended up in execution. This should be in the past, though I’m sad it’s the present for many PMs.

Within time, I worked with organizations that took a more modern approach. They’d still define what to achieve, e.g., accelerate growth, or increase customer satisfaction. And PMs would figure out which product bets could deliver on that. Such approach is already a good one to create value collaboratively, and it’s the present for some PMs today.

My view on the future is the PM as a business person, you’ve got to understand the market, opportunities, positioning, and how to differentiate. All of that will enable you to act as a strategic partner to business. This approach is rare today, though I see with a few teams. The PM becomes more influential than tactical, which requires sharp business knowledge and strong critical thinking skills.

#2 Requirements

How much do you like the word requirements? Be honest.

I hate it because it’s one of the most limiting words I’ve come across. I almost quit product when some people told me I had to put more emphasis on my requirements engineering practices.

In any product, creating value for customers in exchange for something for the business is the only requirement. Most of the rest is just opinions disguised as requirements. I do know that some stuff are necessary to remain compliant with the law and other regulations, but the rest are distracting from your real work.

It should remain in the past the extensive requirement documents, they don’t help you create value, but do limit you to written agreements. And delay real impact. For long, user stories and its variations (job story) became the alternative, which are good for collaboration when done like that, though many teams use that as requirements in disguise.

The future of requirements is blurry to me.

I’m putting my bets on a kind of specs driven development, which scares me to a point because we’re back to long documents. Yet, with a value driven mindset we’d have a way out. If you focus on context, desired outcomes, and constraints, AGI will help you craft documents ready for AI agents to build. Watch out for where you start, what you know, and what you assume you do.

#3 Engineering Collaboration

For long, PMs treated software engineers as coders, no more, no less. PMs defined what to do and engineers built that. That was by design how waterfall approaches worked. I know that some of you reading it today have engineers who are coders, and you’re wondering how you get them to be achievers. No easy task.

Within the burst of Agile frameworks, the collaboration changed for some, not all. Engineers became more active on defining solutions and collaborating with PMs to define the future. That’s good progress, which not everyone achieved. In many places engineers still hide behind what’s written on tickets and refuse to shape the future, which is sad because they’re super smart.

What changes now is the fact we no longer need coders. AI can and will replace those behaving as coders. Yet, we need solid software engineers who think beyond tickets, who think about systems, architecture, opportunities, and value creation. At the pace of AI, engineers need to step up (PMs need, too), and that makes the collaboration more solid and meaningful.

The rebirth of siloes is my concern. It’s easy to hide behind tools and only do what tools allow us and forget about collaboration. Remember, product is a collaborative game, not a lonely one.

#4 Focus

PMs sit between chairs, meaning you wear multiple hats no matter where you are. Focus is extremely hard to reach, most of the time you’re switching context with too many unrelated topics. You can change part of that, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.

For a while, following prescriptive roadmaps was the clear focus for PMs. Of course, delivering on the expectations was, and is for many, often an unachievable mission. The roadmap tends to be a series of unrelated features, which pressured teams to speed up the output speed. The more you shipped, the better.

I do wish feature roadmaps were part of the past, but they aren’t. Today, what I see is a mixture of output with outcome awareness. Kind of, we believe that by shipping feature X, we increase KPI Y. This creates a room for discussion, but features tend to lead the conversation.

Some teams are already working on what I call the future. As AGI makes delivery cheaper than ever, direction becomes more important than ever. It’s not what you ship, but the value you create. You cannot achieve that without clarity on what matters, and what doesn’t.

The future focus (hopefully already present for you) is figuring out ideas that bring no value faster so you kill them. Such approach enables you to eliminate low-value initiatives and double, or triple down on the value drivers.

#5 Customer Involvement

The faster you learn how wrong you are, the better. It took me a while to get familiar with that. I remember my old days of PMs working in São Paulo. With business, we discussed what to do next, and I relentlessly talked to them about customers. We confidently shaped what to build, and the more we discussed, the more confident we got. Then, we naturally invested months building something just to learn how wrong we were. That was frustrating.

Of course, I hope that’s not part of your situation because it’s painful. That should be in the past, not present, and definitely not in the future.

Within the spread of product discovery, thanks to the great work of Teresa Torres, more and more teams increase customer involvement. This helped us identify what customers care about and what they don’t. Indeed, some business leaders still dislike discovery because they think it takes too long to deliver. I’m not opening this thread now, but product discovery done right proves you wrong fast enough, this is what I leave for you to think.

For the future, I have two variations. One that scares, and another that I remain hopeful.

My fear is teams going wild with AI and doing everything they can with synthetic users and ignoring human interaction at all. That scares me because it won’t uncover the unspoken, the hidden opportunities, and it’s the moment products will become more similar than ever.

My hope is that we finally break free from long delivery and blend with discovery, focusing instead on value development. What does that mean? It means we can explore multiple solutions for the same important problem faster and cheaper than ever. And once we find a solution worth building, we kill the others, and create what makes sense.

What’s your view on that one?

#6 Measurement

The metric you measure the most tells you a lot about where you are right now.

Classics are velocity, KPIs, and certain outcomes. Let’s break them down.

Velocity is all about the speed you can ship something, it’s relevant to show how fast the team can get things done. However, it tells you nothing about real value creation. I got promoted already because I managed to increase velocity consistently. Today, I discourage any team to use this metric. For me, this is pure noise.

KPIs are often okay, considering the team had a saying in that. Many teams work with OKRs, which means they will be responsible for some Key Results. When that’s done properly, it gives PMs the chance of making decisions on how to drive the desired results. But we all know reality tends to gravitate to weird directions where Key Results are outputs in disguise, this is the above slightly upgraded.

The future for me has to be outcome measurement in connection to customer behaviour. I say that because the speed of development will be less relevant as everyone will somehow manage to build fast. But not everyone will manage to create impact soon enough.

If you’re on the velocity trap, figure out how to move towards some outcome thinking. Keep in mind that’s not outcome instead of output, but start with the end in mind and then uncover what to do to get that done.

#7 Decision-Making

In fantasy, PMs are decision makers. In reality, PMs are decision followers.

It hurts me to say that because I wish I could say it differently, but that’s still the most present scenario I see. I wish that was part of the past, but it isn’t. Too many PMs follow decisions done by business, which creates a kind of service provider relationship.

For some PMs the present is different. They still don’t own the critical decisions, but they can facilitate decision making with key stakeholders. It’s not my favorite, but it’s better than the previous. The challenge is the longing for consensus, which slows down progress, and often leads to watered down decisions.

In the future, I see the PMs becoming more part of the business given that strategy is more relevant than ever. Within that, you will hopefully own outcome decisions, and be accountable for the results you create.

I hope this ship happens fast for most of you reading this now, though I think this is one of the hardest shifts we have. Leadership still wants to remain in control, and real empowerment is rare. If you have it, enjoy the most of it, if you don’t, do your best to influence key decisions.

What’s your journey?

Every PM has a unique journey. I invite you to use the table I shared in the beginning and evaluate where you are in your journey. That gives you the chance to challenge yourself, leave some things in the past, and ask what’s holding you back to progress towards the future.

The product job is transforming, and I think many changes come for good. Some of my hope are the end of limited responsibilities. PMs working only on execution can be frustrating because you have to follow instead of lead. And the prescriptive requirement game is one of the biggest lies we have. I do hope such things remain buried in the past never to be back to life again.

What do you hope for?

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Talk soon,
David Pereira

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