Product management may feel like a modern discipline, especially in software and SaaS companies. But the history of product management begins long before the product roadmap, the sprint review, or the customer feedback portal.
Product management history is usually traced back to 1931, when Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble wrote a memo calling for dedicated “brand men” who would take responsibility for individual products. Their job was to understand customers, study the market, monitor performance, and make sure each product had the support it needed to succeed.
Since then, product management has evolved through brand management, manufacturing, lean production, software development, Agile, SaaS, and now AI-assisted product operations. The modern product manager may work in a very different environment from McElroy’s brand men, but the core challenge remains familiar: understand customer needs, make strategic trade-offs, and help teams build the right things.
This brief history of product management explores how the role developed — and why its evolution still matters to product leaders today.
Product management history: key milestones
Product management history: the short version
Product management began as a form of brand management in the 1930s, when Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble proposed dedicated managers for individual products. The role later influenced companies such as Hewlett-Packard, where product thinking became closely tied to customer advocacy. In the 1950s, Toyota’s production system and Kanban shaped how teams managed work and flow. The rise of software, Agile and SaaS then turned product management into the cross-functional, strategy-led role we recognise today.
1931: Neil H. McElroy and the origins of product management
While product management is now intrinsically linked with digital products, it didn’t actually start that way. Perhaps surprisingly, the origin of the product manager lies in the personal hygiene and healthcare space.
Way back in 1931 — yep, almost a century ago — Neil H. McElroy, a marketing manager at well-known US brand Procter & Gamble, wrote a simple memo expressing the need to hire more people.
That’s right: it all began with something as every day as an internal memo.
This 800-word document went on to form the basis of the modern product manager, and it did it by way of the “brand man.”
McElroy’s concept described a role that was entirely focused on a single brand or product rather than the business as a whole.
The brand man would be responsible for tracking sales of the product, managing its advertising and promotion, and continuously work on ways to improve it.
This laser-focus on the product was a seed that would eventually grow into the product managers of today.
1940s: Hewlett-Packard and the customer advocate model
McElroy’s influence over the modern business world didn’t end with his memo.
In fact, he went on to become Secretary of Defense and helped found NASA. Quite the career, right?
On top of all of this, he also found time to advise at Stanford University, and it was here that he met Bill Hewlett and David Packard during the late 1930s. These budding entrepreneurs would, of course, go on to found global computer brand Hewlett-Packard (HP), but not before absorbing McElroy’s concept of the brand man and taking it to the next level.
In fact, as explained in David Packard’s book The HP Way, the company leveraged the brand man model to create sustained year-on-year growth of 20% between 1943 and 1993.
(Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard)
The HP interpretation of the brand man ethos was all about creating an internal customer advocate who would be the voice of the customer throughout product development.
If you’re a product manager today, you’ll recognize this concept because it still underpins the role of modern companies across the board.
1950s: Toyota, Kanban and lean product thinking
With a newfound focus on the customer experience across all industries, it’s no surprise that some embraced it more than others.
Over in Japan in 1953, the global car brand Toyota experimented with ways to streamline the production process same like some innovative asian brands doing. They aimed to get the product from the drawing board to the customer even faster.
The result of this experimentation was Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing, originally known simply as the “Toyota Production System.” This concept is based on the idea that raw material orders can be aligned with production schedules so that waste is minimized and the speed of production is improved.
Because the JIT method relies on tight timescales, Toyota needed an efficient way to track the system.
It’s here that the Kanban board was born.
Originally a physical board with cards that could be moved into different categories, the Kanban board created by Taiichi Ohno was used to track the various stages of production.
Immediately recognizable to any product manager, the Kanban board is still used to this day (yep, even within airfocus itself) to streamline the product development process.
But these days, it’s more likely to be digital.
A modern-day Kanban board might include a column for "Planned," another for "In Progress," and finally "Ready for Review."
The concept is that a product development team can track their progress visually and keep the project updated for the whole team to see anytime.
The Kanban board’s roots in the realm of physical manufacturing may be what brought the idea to life. However, there was still plenty of work to streamline production for the digital world — and that’s where the agile methodology enters the picture.
1980s and 1990s: product management moves into software
For much of its early history, product management was closely associated with consumer goods, manufacturing, and brand management. But as software became a major commercial category, the role began to change.
Software products created a different set of challenges. They were not static items that could be launched and left alone. They could be updated, expanded, patched, redesigned, and improved over time. Customer expectations also changed. Users did not simply buy a product once; they expected ongoing value, support, and improvement.
This pushed product managers closer to engineering and design. They needed to understand customer problems, but they also had to work with technical teams to translate those problems into features, requirements, releases, and long-term product direction.
The role became more cross-functional. Product managers were no longer only thinking about positioning, sales, or market performance. They were helping teams decide what to build, what not to build, and how to balance customer needs with technical constraints and business goals.
This period helped shape the modern product manager as a translator between worlds: customer and company, strategy and execution, business and technology.
It also introduced a tension that still defines product management today. As products became more complex, product teams needed more structure. But too much structure could slow down learning, decision-making, and delivery. That tension would become one of the forces behind the Agile movement.
2001: Agile and the modern product manager
As digital technology came to the fore over the latter half of the 20th Century, it became clear that the processes used by physical manufacturing might not be the best fit for digital ones.
They worked, sure — but they certainly weren’t optimal.
In short, there was plenty of room for improvement.
And that improvement came in February 2001 with the publication of The Agile Manifesto.
The Agile Manifesto was created by 17 individuals — known today as the Agile Alliance — all of whom were closely involved with software development.
The other common thread?
They all knew things could be done better.
The result was The Agile Manifesto, which sought to define a set of 4 values and 12 principles that would streamline software development end to end.
The manifesto proposed the following values:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
These values were combined with a full list of 12 principles covering everything from prioritizing customer satisfaction to regular team retrospectives.
So, how does the creation of the agile methodology tie into the evolution of the product manager?
Well, they’re almost one and the same. As you’ll know if you’re in product management, agile is now the go-to methodology for software development, and the guidelines detailed in the manifesto still apply today.
Ideas like sustainable development, regular progress reviews, the willingness to pivot in the face of new information, and the number one priority of customer satisfaction are all at the core of most modern development teams.
And that takes us, very neatly, to where we are today.
2010s: SaaS and the product-led growth era
A quick glance at the modern landscape of digital business, and it’s clear: product management is here to stay.
And the hiring landscape reflects that. Some of the biggest companies in the world are now on the hunt for product managers to develop their offerings in the way that only a product manager can.
Want to know the biggest players investing in product management right now? Here are our picks:
Google / Alphabet. The world’s biggest search engine, and its parent company Alphabet, are a natural fit for the product manager role. With a sharp focus on next-gen machine learning and AI, Google is investing heavily in product development via initiatives like its Associate Product Manager Program. This program is currently led by Brian Rakowski, who joined the company in 2002 as the APM for Gmail.
HSBC. We mention this one because a bank is not the type of business you’d normally associate with product management. The reality is that all businesses are pushing towards digital — and ventures such as mobile apps and rich web experiences require product managers.
Intercom. Intercom's famous RICE scoring framework is still used by product teams around the world. Their framework is centered around the 4 key metrics, which form the acronym RICE. These 4 key metrics are Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. You can learn more about it here or by watching the video below.
Thanks to the boom in Software-as-a-Service, the role of a product manager is no longer something that raises a quizzical look, at least not for those familiar with the SaaS space.
In fact, in many corners of the internet, product managers are reaching something like rockstar status.
And, with the digital landscape shifting all the time, it won’t be a surprise at all if some of today’s product managers become the pioneers of tomorrow — just like Neil McElroy.
With that in mind, let’s cast an eye over a couple of promising talents in the product management space:
Jules Walter, Former Product Leader at Slack. As one of the world’s most popular communication platforms, Slack is growing — and fast. And leading that charge is Jules Walter, one of the brand’s most prominent product managers.
Lulu Cheng, Product Manager of Discovery Team at Pinterest. Starting her career with brands like Dropbox and Microsoft, Lulu Cheng has now taken her product management talents to Pinterest — one of the world’s fastest-growing social platforms.
Gibson Biddle, Former Netflix Product Manager. Sometimes, the very best examples of product management come from those who’ve seen it all before. In the case of Gibson Biddle, we’re talking about someone who managed features for Netflix as it grew from 2.5 million users to a whopping 12.8 million. Gibson is certainly one to watch.
Of course, there are tons of inspiring product leaders who we didn't include in this article and deserve a spot here. If you want us to expand our list, let us know which product leader has inspired you and how.
2020s: AI, product operations, and the future of product management
Product management is now entering another phase. The basic challenge has not changed: product teams still need to understand customers, make strategic choices, prioritize work, and deliver value. But the environment around those decisions has become more complex.
Modern product organizations often deal with huge volumes of feedback from sales calls, support tickets, customer interviews, app reviews, surveys, usage data, and internal stakeholders. At the same time, product leaders are expected to connect that feedback to strategy, portfolio planning, roadmap decisions, and measurable business outcomes.
This is one reason product operations has become more important. As product organizations scale, they need better systems for managing feedback, aligning teams, standardizing decision-making, and keeping product strategy connected to execution.
AI is accelerating this shift. Product teams are beginning to use AI to summarize feedback, identify patterns, generate documentation, analyze customer signals, and support prioritization workflows. But the goal is not to replace product judgment. It is to help teams make better use of the context they already have.
The next stage of product management will likely be defined by context-rich decision-making. Product managers and product leaders will still need to ask the hard questions: What matters most? What problem are we solving? Which opportunities align with our strategy? What should we say no to?
But they will increasingly rely on better systems, better data, and AI-assisted workflows to answer those questions at scale.
In that sense, the future of product management is connected to its past. McElroy’s original memo was about giving products dedicated attention, clear ownership, and a better understanding of the customer. Nearly a century later, those same principles still matter. The difference is the scale and complexity of the decisions product teams now have to make.
Why product management history still matters today
The history of product management isn't just a story about where the role came from. It also explains why the role continues to evolve and remain important.
Product management has always emerged in response to complexity. At P&G, the challenge was understanding why individual products were performing differently across territories and customer groups. At HP, the challenge was staying close to customers while building technically sophisticated products. In software and SaaS, the challenge became connecting customer needs, engineering work, business strategy, and ongoing product improvement.
Today’s product leaders face an even more complicated version of the same problem.
They have more customer feedback, more internal stakeholders, more product lines, more strategic dependencies, and more pressure to show how product decisions connect to business outcomes. Without a clear product management function, organizations can easily drift into reactive decision-making. Roadmaps become overloaded. Feedback gets scattered across tools. Priorities are shaped by the loudest stakeholder rather than the strongest evidence.
Understanding the history of product management helps make sense of the modern role. Product management has never been only about managing features. It has been about creating focus on knowing the customer, understanding the market, making trade-offs, and helping the organization decide where to place its effort.
That is why the role has remained relevant through so many changes in technology, methodology, and business models. The tools have changed. The operating environment has changed. But the need for product judgment has not.
Andrei Tiburca
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