The PM role identity crisis: Senior leaders publicly questioning whether the job should exist

The people most passionately defending the product manager role right now are, ironically, the ones who struggle most to explain what it actually does. Scroll through LinkedIn on any given Tuesday and you will find a dozen PMs writing impassioned posts about why their role matters, citing collaboration, strategy, and customer empathy. But ask them to name a single decision their team would have gotten wrong without them, and you get silence. Or worse, you get a vague gesture toward "alignment."

That silence is the problem.

Tobi Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

When Tobi Lutke posted that Shopify would default to not hiring product managers, the product community treated it like a five-alarm fire. Twitter erupted. LinkedIn turned into a support group. But Lutke did not say anything that engineering leaders had not been muttering in private for years. He just said it publicly, with a CEO's authority behind it.

The uncomfortable truth is that plenty of product managers have been operating as high-paid project coordinators for a long time. They schedule meetings. They write tickets. They move cards across Kanban boards. They run stand-ups. None of these activities require product judgment. Any organised person with a Jira login can do them.

I call this the articulation gap: the distance between what a PM's title promises and what their daily work actually delivers. The wider the gap, the more vulnerable the role.

When I was at Freshworks, I watched this play out in real time. We had product managers who spent their entire week in the mechanics of delivery. Writing user stories. Updating sprint boards. Chasing engineers for status updates. They were busy, certainly. But they were not making product decisions. They were administering a process.

When the organisation restructured, those PMs were the first roles eliminated. Here is what should make every product manager uncomfortable: nobody noticed. The engineers kept building. The designers kept designing. The standups kept happening. The work flowed exactly as it had before, because the work those PMs were doing was not uniquely theirs. It belonged to the process, not to the person.

The Decision Residue

But not all PMs are interchangeable process administrators. Some leave behind what I think of as decision residue: the invisible trace of good product judgment that only becomes visible when it disappears.

At Adobe, I worked alongside a PM who operated nothing like the Freshworks coordinators. She sat at the intersection of engineering constraints and commercial priorities, two worlds that spoke entirely different languages. Engineering would propose a technically elegant solution that served 3% of the user base. The business team would demand a feature that required rebuilding half the platform. She was the person who found the third option, the one that satisfied enough of both constraints to actually ship something valuable.

When she left the company, the team shipped two features in the following quarter that made zero commercial sense. Technically impressive. Commercially pointless. The engineering team had optimised for what they found interesting. The business team had not pushed back because nobody was translating their concerns into technical trade-offs. The decision residue was gone, and the team did not even realise it until the revenue numbers came in.

That is the difference between a PM who holds a title and a PM who holds a role. The title is a line on an org chart. The role is a function that, when removed, changes outcomes.

The Articulation Gap Is a Skills Problem, Not a Narrative Problem

Here is where the PM community keeps getting the response wrong. Every time someone questions the role, product managers rush to write thought pieces about why PMs matter. They build frameworks. They create Venn diagrams showing the PM at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. They quote Marty Cagan.

But the problem is not that PMs lack a compelling narrative about their value. The problem is that too many PMs lack the actual skills that would make the narrative true.

If you cannot point to a decision that would have been made differently without you in the room, you do not have a role. You have a title.

This is not comfortable to hear. But comfort is not the point.

The PM identity crisis is not about whether the role matters. It is about whether the person in it does. And that distinction is everything. Lutke was not arguing that product thinking is unnecessary. He was arguing that product thinking does not require a dedicated product manager, at least not the kind who functions primarily as a coordination layer.

He is half right.

Product thinking does not require someone whose main contribution is scheduling and status tracking. But it does require someone who can hold multiple competing constraints in their head simultaneously and find a path through them. The question every PM needs to answer is: which one am I?

The Survival Test

There is a simple test I have started recommending to product managers who feel anxious about this reckoning. Sit down and write a list of the last ten decisions your product team made. Not features shipped. Decisions made. Trade-offs resolved. Directions chosen over alternatives.

Now circle the ones that would have gone differently if you had not been in the room.

If you can circle five or more, you have a role. You are the person who shapes outcomes, not the person who tracks them. But if you are staring at a list of ten decisions and struggling to circle even two, the identity crisis is not abstract. It is yours.

The good news is that the articulation gap is closeable. It requires shifting from process work to judgment work. From asking "what is the status?" to asking "what are we trading off?" From running the meeting to changing the meeting's conclusion.

But it requires honesty first. The kind of honesty that most professional communities are not great at, because it means admitting that some of your peers (and possibly you) have been coasting on a title that the industry granted generously during the growth years and is now auditing more carefully.

I have seen PMs close the articulation gap in six months. It is not a years-long transformation. It is a focus shift. But it starts with accepting that the question "should PMs exist?" is not an attack on the profession. It is a performance review that the profession has been avoiding.

What the Critics Miss

But Lutke and his fellow travellers miss something important too. They see the worst version of the PM role and conclude that the role itself is the problem. That is like watching a bad surgeon and concluding that surgery is unnecessary.

The PMs who generate decision residue are not performing a function that engineers or designers can absorb. Engineers optimise for technical excellence. Designers optimise for user experience. Business leaders optimise for revenue. But someone has to make the call about which optimisation wins in this specific context, for this specific customer, at this specific moment. That is product judgment. It is genuinely hard to do well.

The role does not need to be abolished. It needs to be earned, every quarter, by every person who holds the title. But the earning is a reckoning with individual performance, not with the concept of product management itself.

The best PMs I have worked with never worried about whether their role would be eliminated. They were too busy making decisions that nobody else in the room could make. That quiet confidence is worth more than any LinkedIn post defending the profession.

If you are a PM reading this and feeling defensive, that feeling is data. Sit with it.