Product Management then vs Product Management now

Don’t you just envy Product Managers of the ’90s and early 2000s? Everything was so much easier, undiscovered, and fresh. Is it so hard now because of their mistakes or are we that smarter? Well…

Let me start by saying it’s like I blame the Product Managers “of old”. You have to learn to walk before you run. Just because in the early days there was no emphasis on long-term technical excellence or user privacy, doesn’t mean that problems that those answers weren’t there.

Truth be told, Product Management and the entire IT industry, used to be a niche, a boutique industry really, where different sins and omissions would be accepted because they would affect a limited number of passionate users. Early user data leaks from Google or Microsoft would basically go unnoticed, as no one cared and the whole ordeal wasn’t even regulated properly.

The reason I have to spend weeks and months before sending anything new to the product live is the fact that our little niche industry has become more than mainstream. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake even for the smallest of products.

Thus, as the industry matured, so did Product Management, making it so much more complicated…

However…