Are there too many Product Managers? - Phil Hornby

What are some ways in which product management as a discipline has changed?

The biggest change is the number of product managers. And I don't mean that simply in terms of there are more companies using the product way of thinking and therefore have more product managers. I mean, there are more product managers in the same company doing broadly the same amount of scope of product, should we say. There's more product managers per product. The ratio of product managers to engineer has changed.

You used to have maybe a hundred engineers per product manager. It was a super senior role. And therefore there were a lot of more engineers that were working on the things that essentially you were directing. You started product later in your career, 10, 15 years into your career. You had business experience. You had that context. Whereas now there's, I guess I'd term it as a new operational layer of product managers. And I think it's kind of come with discovery work coming in where there's a need to be more closely aligned with the teams with agile coming in as well, more closely aligned with the teams. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's a change.

And that commercial understanding is just not there for many product people. It's not their fault. It's that they've not been exposed to it.