Jack Murray - BlogThe strange collapse of product management1290 words (approx 7 min)

It's 2025, and I’ve been in product management for over 8 years.

And in just the last few, product management seems to have gone dramatically from revered to ridiculed.

What the hell happened?

What was once a high-agency, high-impact role where you zoomed in and out from strategy to execution, filling gaps no one else saw, doing whatever is needed to ship value… is now a husk of its former self.

Tiktoks mock PMs as JIRA monkeys and annoying process people.

Teams confuse them for delivery managers, agile coaches, or Powerpoint strategists floating above the real work.

Leaders think they’re expensive project managers.

Product people themselves think they’re spewing gold when regurgitating a framework they heard on Lenny’s Podcast.

And completely honestly?

It’s past saving.

But that's okay.

The now set concrete misconceptions about what product management is makes it nearly impossible to do the really valuable, expert-but-generalist work that made product people so valuable.

You inevitably get caught up in the misconceptions and spend too much time and energy fighting against them rather than just doing the valuable work, which was already ridiculously hard and demanding enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked in companies that have got this right at times. But getting it right is walking on a knife edge, and one slip and you’re back in the “what does product management even do again?” fight.

The truth is though, it’s not these companies’ fault, and it's not peoples' fault.

Product management has collapsed in on itself.

PM as Project Manager and Process Person

Great product work has always been hard to measure.

Output metrics don’t capture it.

Outcome metrics are harder to trace than is made out.

Qualitative feedback is political.

That ambiguity used to be a feature, not a bug. It empowered companies to think holistically, leverage data and taste and intuition, and run teams with servant leaders.

But somewhere along the line, it became a thing to judge PMs by outputs.

Velocity tracking.

Backlog grooming.

Delivery reporting.

Quarterly OKRs.

Capital ‘A’ Agile and other narrow focus frameworks have warped everything. Instead of focusing on value, PMs became JIRA monkeys and scrum overlords. Process replaced a good chunk of product thinking.

And the worst part? Many new PMs embraced it. They became obsessed with stand ups, sprints, story points and quarterly planning… losing sight of the actual product.

Suddenly, product managers became mis-titled project managers or delivery managers.

Let’s be completely honest and clear: not everything needs a product manager.

If you're doing a clearly defined, sequential build… guess what?

That’s not product. That’s project. Call it what it is.

Not everything has to be force-fit into "agile".

Product management as a role doesn’t have to be everywhere.

Someone will be (or should be) doing the responsibilities of product people (especially business viability and customer value risk mitigation), but not every company culture needs that to be in the form of a product manager role.

Strong product people know that process is a tool, not a purpose. It’s a tradeoff between velocity, quality, and risk. Just like user friction kills conversion, process friction kills team momentum.

If your goal isn’t shipping valuable things end to end, what are you doing?

The Strategy PM Illusion

On the flip side, there’s the strategy-only PMs.

The ones crafting narratives, making decks, and talking outcomes - while staying far from the chaos of delivery.

Making “visions” and selling dreams.

They’ll claim wins, completely distance themselves from failures, and rarely (if ever) touch the ground.

They’re master politicians.

Truthfully, too many of them love hearing the sound of their own voice.

These are usually very smart people, but they’re using their intelligence so wastefully.

But product work isn’t so clean. It isn’t just generating insight, setting direction, and walking away. Strategy disconnected from execution is fantasy.

When you only operate at 30,000 feet, you stop knowing what’s actually happening and you stop being able to make the right decisions. The people closest to the ground make the best product decisions.

If you're not doing the execution of the strategy, you're a product strategist or strategy manager or management consultant. You're not really a ‘product manager’.

Calling them product managers completely convolutes the matter and continues the misconception snowball.

The ‘exception’ is in leadership (that has direct line management). They still do execution, but it takes a different form - via the PMs they directly mentor and manage. I’m fortunate enough to have worked with some great product leaders and seen this in practice.

Good ones are a sparring partner, supporter and absolute advocate for the PMs they manage. They never throw their direct reports under the bus when outcomes don’t follow. They share in the failures, and the best ones relinquish their ego and give their reports and teams complete credit for the successes. They recognise their role in execution.

Good product leaders like this are incredibly hard to find and hire for.

It’s Product Management that collapsed in on itself

Product’s vagueness is both its beauty and its curse.

It allowed for a role that morphed by company, by industry, by stage, by team, and so on.

There is no single, constricted definition like other more 'hard disciplines' by design.

And that makes it even harder to hire, evaluate, or grow the role consistently.

Even product management’s role in Marty Cagan’s “4 risks” model - I’d argue one the clearest definitions we have - is very hard (if not still impossible) to performance manage in practice.

This lack of clarity created enormous value, but led to fragmentation of definitions.

These fragmented definitions made it mean too many specific things at the same time.

And this led to a crumbling foundation.

The truth is that product management has collapsed in on itself.

It’s no one’s fault.

Not the companies.

Not the product managers.

Not the leaders.

It’s a natural running-of-course of a thing that drew its value from being ambiguous.

Ambiguity as a strength eventually became its weakness.

The future of tech teams

Alright, this isn’t just a rant, I promise.

Here’s the silver lining I see. AI is undoubtedly reshaping team structures entirely.

The trend toward hyper-specialisation? It’s reversing.

The pendulum is swinging.

Generalists with execution muscles are back in style.

And not just in startups - across the board, companies are starting to question and rethink the bloated rough “1 PM, 1 Designer, 6 Engineers” or “enough to share 2 pizzas” per team model.

Expect smaller teams.

Expect fused roles.

When the tide goes out, the people who cling to the now traditional narrow, siloed job definitions will be exposed.

This isn’t just about product managers either.

Engineers who only code what they’re told, designers who only Figma and hand-off, marketers who only set up and monitor paid ads - they’re all also going to be caught up in this wave.

The title “Product Manager” will probably never recover.

The misconceptions are too entrenched.

The concrete is set.

Product thinking is as valuable as ever, if not more valuable with how ‘easy’ it is to build things but how ‘hard’ it is to build the right things.

It’s great product-thinking people - the curious, gritty, high-agency generalists - that will find great homes in the new wave of product teams. Where execution and judgment combined matter more than rituals and frameworks and 'strategy'.

Product thinking definitely is not dying.

It’s just capital ‘P’ capital ‘M’ Product Management that is.

Call it a rebirth.