One thing I’ve noticed is that people often get confused by product management, so I want to offer a thought experiment. Let’s consider all the factors that might influence the role of a product manager in a company. First, does the company even sell a product, or is it more of a tech-enabled business? Then, there’s the product stage to think about. Where was the company founded, and in what region are its customers located? Or maybe it spans several regions.
The stage of the company itself matters. Is it a B2B or B2C business? What’s the size of the company? The size of its teams? The company’s financial position is also relevant—whether it’s doing well or struggling affects product management too. Then, there’s the competitive landscape, as well as the company’s current competitive position. What stage of funding is the company in, and who’s on board? Who’s on the board? Overall, what are the investor expectations?
The engineering culture plays a big role, particularly the culture around engineering management. How do things work in sales, marketing, and support? How about staff turnover? For example, if people are only staying an average of 18 months, that impacts the product management culture. Past experiences and beliefs of early hires come into play, as well as the mindset of the founders. Does the organization incentivize individual projects or team-based initiatives? Is it structured functionally or by business line?
We can’t ignore the profile of the customers either. Are they consumers out in the world or people working in governments? And what about the number of customers or users the company has? Are products being sold for millions of dollars or for free with ad support? The complexity of the buying process matters, as does the number of segments. Does the company plan to expand geographically? Is the product something that needs heavy customization every time it’s purchased?
Then, consider whether the company plans to pursue mergers and acquisitions. What is the regulatory and compliance landscape? And what about the health of the tech stack? Is it even working? Is it weighed down with technical debt? Are there a lot of dependencies? And are you even able to measure anything effectively?
You get the point. This is a massive list of factors, and each of these things impacts product management culture within a company. Imagine combining all these dimensions and comparing companies. You’d likely see clusters of different types of companies. Depending on how far you zoom out, you might say, “Well, actually there are only three types of companies—these, these, and these.” But if you zoom in deeper, you’d see many different clusters of companies with subtle differences. This is part of why product management can feel so messy and inconsistent.
Now, this complexity also influences the kinds of product advice you’ll encounter. There’s context-free advice and contextual advice, and within those categories, you have directional and actionable advice. For example, context-free directional advice might be broad principles—books that outline 20 key product management rules. Some advice is even presented as universal solutions, like “Everyone should just do this.” Context-free actionable advice is usually described as best practices—things you’re advised to try out, but with the understanding that you may need to adapt them.
Then there’s contextual directional advice, which might include heuristics that tell you what to do in certain situations or contexts. Contextual actionable advice, on the other hand, is more like a playbook: in B2B SaaS, for instance, here’s a playbook for how to handle various scenarios. When people wonder why there isn’t a clear definition of product management or a consensus on what a product manager should do, it’s because product management spans all these clusters and types of advice. There’s no silver bullet. You can’t replace contextual, actionable advice with context-free advice and expect it to work universally.
Meanwhile, the broader market landscape varies significantly. We see adoption of various practices progressing over time, like in technology adoption in U.S. households—from flushing toilets to landlines. Some innovations take decades to catch on, while others take a couple of years. Ideally, adoption is speeding up, but the reality is that in today’s product landscape, you have companies operating like it’s still 2005 and others pushing the limits, trying to operate like it’s already 2025 or even 2030, even though it’s 2024.
So, why does any of this matter? Many people assume that the complexity of product management—its lack of a shared language, the fact that it’s defined differently everywhere—means that product management itself is flawed. They think if we could just define product management, or find a silver bullet to explain it, then everything would be clear. But I see it differently. This complexity doesn’t mean product management is too hard to learn. It just means we need to approach it differently. Product management is behaving exactly as one would expect, given its stage of evolution and the dimensionality I just described. It’s a feature, not a bug.
What this means is that if you want to learn product management, you may need to shift your learning approach. Move from formal mentorship to guided mentorship, from one-way teaching to two-way apprenticeship, and from classroom learning to hands-on shadowing. You might focus more on collaborative sense-making rather than individual learning, exploratory role growth instead of structured career paths, and learning through real-world challenges rather than rote learning. Shift from following instructions to interpreting principles in context.
These aren’t revolutionary ideas; they’re learning techniques that have always been used throughout history when dealing with emergent fields that require contextual understanding. So, instead of thinking that product management is fundamentally flawed because it’s hard to define, realize that its complexity is expected given its dimensionality and the varying adoption levels across the field. The key is to refocus your learning approach.
I hope this perspective is helpful. Thank you.
Keep Product Management Messy