August 18, 2026
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The word "product" is doing some heavy lifting in a lot of "product managers" these days. Strip it out and see what's left. If the answer is coordination, meetings, Jira story writing, and stakeholder alignment, you didn't hire a product manager. You hired an internal bureaucrat with a nicer title. The decision making happens somewhere else: somewhere higher up.
You can spot it in job descriptions. When "product manager" is followed by a comma and a list of responsibilities that could be anyone's job, the product is not being managed. It's being described. There are now "technical" product managers (whatever that is supposed to mean), and I've even seen a "product manager for sales" (sic!). In some organizations, the ratio of product managers to other roles has taken absurd forms. I hate to break it to you, but too many product managers make an organization dysfunctional.
The most dysfunctional form is pooling. Pooling PMs across multiple teams is what leadership does when it can't or won't decide which product matters most, and who should be responsible for its success. It's an evasive accounting maneuver, not a strategy. You get to claim you have product management in place without paying the price of picking a bet. The org chart calls it shared capacity. The reality is that a group of product managers is now responsible for an even larger number of things nobody has committed to.
You haven't solved any problems. You've just moved them off the executive balance sheet and onto someone with less power to push back. It won't work, and the tensions will still be there - you just won't feel them directly.
So why are executives still picking pooled PMs over specific product ownership? It's either because:
Sooner or later the tensions become unbearable for the pooled PMs and the teams. If you're lucky, someone will point this out to the executive. What inevitably will happen next is what I call "leadership circus": an external (mostly, sometimes internal) consultant gets hired to establish guidelines and a shared understanding of what it means to lead people. Because from the executive's point of view, it's all the PMs fault. If things don't work in their domain, it must be due to their lack of good leadership, right?
A few weeks ago, I gave a tour of our company to the leadership team of another company. When it came to the Q&A part, their first question was "Where are your leadership principles?". They told me they had recently grown from 25 to 45 people, there were tensions everywhere, product management was pooled, and they just hired an external consultant to "fix leadership".
Much to their surprise, I told them this: Executives tend to only hire consultants that fix problems elsewhere. Which might not necessarily be the problems that cause the tensions. In fact, they might not even touch the underlying root causes. Especially if they question the executive's own interactions, their part of the org chart and their delegation flow. In fact, in over 25 years in the industry, I've never been lucky enough to witness an executive self-reflecting enough to be able to pull that off. They might exist, but I think they are very rare. So here's what most executives do: instead of taking a step back, and delegating ownership to specific products, they sign off on a huge budget for a leadership circus they themselves conveniently will never be a part of. We're talking dozens of meetings and workshops with everyone in a leadership position below the executive. Everybody gets a say, but the real problems are never ever being addressed. This multi-step "process" is usually accompanied by an endless stream of nicely designed powerpoints, emailed to everyone involved. In the end, it spits out well-designed posters with official leadership principles six months later.
I've seen these posters in many organizations (I sometimes get to visit other orgs to learn). What strikes me most is their sameness, that they are all eerily alike. The executives are usually quite fond of them, but if you talk to their talent people, they admit that nobody ever reads them and they don't help anyone. What these posters do is blame the victims of teflon-mode, of unclear product ownership, of evasive accounting maneuvers.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not all against these posters. In some cases, writing down what you expect of people may actually help (I won't argue against "being nice to others"). I just don't think they solve any real problems. When I see them on a company's wall, I treat them as proof for delegation decisions someone refused to make.
TL;DR: Real product management is inseparable from a specific product. Dilute the ownership and you get busywork with a roadmap on top. Do not pool PMs. And "pretty" please, don't slap the title "product manager" on everything that has a roadmap.