A junior employee at Procter & Gamble wrote a memo in 1931, and a profession was born.
In 1931, Neil McElroy, a junior advertising manager at Procter & Gamble, wrote a three-page memo proposing that the company assign a dedicated person to manage each brand as though it were an independent business.1 The person would be responsible for everything related to that brand: advertising, sales tracking, competitive analysis, and coordination with the factory. McElroy called this person a "brand man."
P&G adopted the system. Each brand, from Ivory soap to Camay, received its own manager who was accountable for its performance. The model separated the company into semi-autonomous units competing for resources and shelf space, sometimes against each other.2
The brand management model spread from packaged goods to other industries over the following decades. Hewlett-Packard adopted a version of it in the 1960s, adapting the concept for technology products.3 As software companies grew in the 1980s and 1990s, the role evolved from brand management to product management, shifting the emphasis from marketing a finished product to defining what the product should be in the first place.
Ben Horowitz, later co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, described the product manager at Netscape in the late 1990s as the person responsible for defining the product's requirements and ensuring they were built correctly, a role he called "the CEO of the product."4
The product manager became one of the most sought-after roles in the technology industry by the 2010s. The role required no specific degree, drew from engineering, design, and business, and carried significant decision-making authority despite having no direct reports in most organizations. Marty Cagan, a former product executive at eBay and Netscape, described the product manager as responsible for ensuring that the team builds a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.5
McElroy rose from his memo-writing position to become president of Procter & Gamble and later served as United States Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower from 1957 to 1959.6