Product management spent five years optimizing for the wrong skills

Tom Verrilli states plainly that the core skills of product management are not the ones the profession has rewarded over the last five years. Storytelling, alignment, and strategy took priority. The technical work and the customer-oriented work, the parts that constitute actual product judgment, got deprioritized. That is not a critique of individual PMs. It is a critique of the incentive structure the industry built and then selected for.

Verrilli names the resulting archetype directly. PMs whose primary competency is driving alignment and building relationships, rather than anything technical or customer-facing, now register for him as an anti-pattern. The canonical interview answer in that mold, a story about failing to keep an executive informed, is a signal to move on. That this type of candidate was, until recently, often the successful type is the problem he is describing.

Peter Sellis frames the distribution problem in structural terms. The median product manager, he argues, is probably pretty bad. The profession, by its nature, is set up that way. That is a harder claim than it first appears: it means the typical PM output is not a near-miss of good product work, it is something closer to the floor of the distribution.

The structural responses some companies are choosing are more pointed than any critique. David Haber says his company runs with zero product managers. The verbatim is unambiguous: “We don’t have any PMs.” That absence is not an early-stage gap waiting to be filled. It is a deliberate operating choice.

Quinn Slack makes a similar argument about trajectory. Watching companies at a comparable size begin hiring product managers and marketers, Slack describes the pattern as the old way of building a software business. The concern is structural: that model tends toward a state where roughly ten percent of people focus on building a great product while the other ninety percent focus on overhead. Slack’s position is that this ratio was once a necessary cost of the business and is no longer.

The consequences at the leadership level suggest the misalignment is not merely theoretical. Eric Vishria, who works with scaling artificial intelligence companies, observes that leaders arriving from the prior generation with strong track records are frequently flaming out. The experience and credentials that made them credible inside one era’s product organizations are not translating. What got rewarded before is not what the current environment requires.

What the evidence adds up to is a profession that spent years selecting for process fluency and political competence, and is now confronting the cost. The companies that avoided building that overhead, or that are actively questioning whether to build it, are not operating from a contrarian theory. They are responding to a real gap between what PM roles have been rewarded for and what building a good product actually requires. The profession can reorient around technical depth and genuine customer understanding, or it can continue optimizing for the skills that got it here. The two paths are not compatible.