The Link Between Brand Management and Product Mangement

Product management is a central discipline in just about every technology company in the world. The job, at least as we describe it at Percolate, is to own the strategy and roadmap for the team product/s and oversee the execution of those products. At places like Google (and Percolate) these jobs are held almost exclusively by people with an engineering background. The thinking here is two-fold: On one side the engineer's approach to solving problems is generally pretty optimal and on the other, it's hard to lead a team of talented engineers if you don't understand what they're doing at a pretty deep level. (While product managers mostly don't actually manage the engineers on their teams, they are expected to "lead" the team and make choices around what they're developing.)

What's interesting about product management, though, is that it actually came from the world of marketing. The idea was inspired by brand management, which was originally introduced by Proctor & Gamble in 1931. I've read bits and pieces alluding to this connection, but this piece on the evolution of the discipline draws the line quite explicitly:

One reason product management has not traditionally been included in engineering curricula is because it did not start as an engineering role. Its earliest form was brand management, a term coined by a young advertising manager named Neil McElroy, who in 1931 wrote a memo to the executive team at Procter & Gamble proposing the idea of a "brand man"—an employee who would be responsible for a product, rather than a business function.3 The role had many similarities to modern-day product management. His memo called out the need to promote processes that work and outline solutions to problems. Above all, it called for the "brand man" to take full responsibility for the product.