How Product Management Lost Its Voice and Its Influence, and How to Get It Back

In my earlier post, Did Silicon Valley Kill Product Management?, I argued that the shift in power from product to technology wasn’t intentional. It was a byproduct of rapid advances in software and infrastructure. As building technology became easier and faster, the spotlight naturally moved to the technologists.

But what happened next was more subtle, and more damaging. Over time, product managers began to absorb the behavior and language of the technology organizations they worked beside. As product teams became increasingly entangled in delivery, we started talking like technologists. We talked about velocity, sprints, agile versus waterfall. We started measuring success in terms of output instead of outcome. Somewhere along the way, the product vocabulary of markets, customers, and value was replaced by one of story points, tickets, and release cadence.

We thought we were adapting. In truth, we were assimilating. And the more we sounded like technologists, the more we were treated like them, not as the authors of what and why, but as delivery partners responsible for how. That shift has even seeped into recruitment, with many senior product roles now demanding engineering backgrounds or agile delivery certifications. The assumption seems to be that a good product manager is someone who can manage delivery rather than define direction.

The relationship between product and technology should be simple. Product defines what to build and when to build it. Technology defines how it gets built. But somewhere along the way, that balance inverted. Product became subordinate to technology. The what and when began to be dictated by engineering roadmaps, not market needs. Because we started speaking their language, we started playing their part. We were written into their story instead of writing our own.

Once the storyteller for the product, the product manager now often listens from the sidelines

When I started in product management twenty years ago, the product person was the face of the product. They got on the plane. They stood on the stage. They met customers and evangelized what the company was building. They were the first person the CEO called when they wanted to understand how the product was performing. Today, that role often belongs to the CTO. The technologist is now the one traveling to conferences, speaking with customers, and briefing the CEO. That’s not because CTOs took the role from us, it’s because we gave it away. We let our function become a delivery engine rather than a strategic one.

Reclaiming the voice of product isn’t about ego or status. It’s about ensuring that the products we build actually succeed in the market. For zero-to-one products, this technology-first approach has often worked. It has allowed new ideas to reach the market faster and enabled the market to react more quickly. But beyond that first release, the cracks start to show. Many of these products fail to grow because the people driving the next iterations are still thinking in technical terms rather than in customer or market terms.

Technologists are brilliant at solving problems, but they are not always best placed to define which problems matter most. That’s the job of product management. When that role is diminished, companies struggle to decide what to build next. Features are added because they can be, not because they should be. The result is a flood of products that ship fast but fail faster. And when those products miss the mark, CEOs often turn back to the CTO to fix it, forgetting that the issue isn’t technical. It’s strategic. The only thing worse than shipping a product late is shipping the wrong product late, and that’s happening too often.

If we want to restore product to its rightful place, we have to stop acting like supporting characters in someone else’s story. We have to write our own. That starts with reclaiming our language. Talking again about users, problems, and outcomes. Being curious about the market. Owning the numbers — revenue, cost, adoption — not just the backlog. Product management was never meant to be a delivery discipline. It was meant to be a discipline of direction. The job was never to ship features, it was to define the future.

Technology may have changed the pace, but it shouldn’t change the purpose. It’s time to start speaking like product managers again and to make sure the next chapter is written in our own words, for the sake of better products, stronger companies, and healthier markets.