“Driving alignment”, or just doing the executive team’s bidding?
In modern tech companies, the Product Manager has become one of the most coveted and well-compensated roles. At many major tech companies, Product Managers (PMs) earn higher salaries and are framed as influential leaders, often described as the “CEO of the product” (yet, oddly enough, they don’t tend to hold direct authority over anyone). On paper, PMs are tasked with high-level decision-making, aligning cross-functional teams, and delivering business value. But beneath these ambiguous job descriptions lies a question that many (including myself, with eight years of PM experience) still wonder: What exactly does a Product Manager do?
Unlike other product team members – engineers, designers, researchers – whose roles are rooted in tangible deliverables like code, wireframes, or data insights – the PM’s outputs often remain abstract: translation, prioritization, synchronization. A PM’s tangibles might look like a roadmap, a backlog, lists of KPIs and OKRs… but these are deliverables of process, not product.
The PM today functions as an intermediary between executives and the teams who build, maintain, sell, and use the product. Sitting in the middle of different teams with different projects, timelines, and priorities, a PM ensures everyone is moving forward toward the same goal. But why is this coordination even necessary?
Imagine an e-commerce company where the marketing team is setting up a seasonal promotion. Maybe design is updating site visuals to improve CTA’s, and engineering is fixing a bug to improve checkout flow. Meanwhile, customers are asking for subscription-based options to make repeat orders easier. All of these objectives point toward the same outcome – improving customer experience and increasing conversions. Because these are not conflicting goals to begin with, shouldn’t they, in theory, coexist without the need for a role tasked primarily with driving alignment?
In practice, these teams don’t typically move as one. Even when they’re all working toward the same broad outcome, they tend to operate in siloes, where lack of shared context and real-time communication means redundancies form and opportunities get missed. A PM can play a vital role in timing and coordination.
However, that need isn’t organic; it’s structural. It’s a direct result of an organization where decision-making has been isolated from implementation, and communication is flowing up and down rather than across. The need for a PM then only exists because of this hierarchical structure where strategic direction is set from the top, and execution must then be distributed across its disconnected teams.
Now imagine in the e-commerce company that leadership has stepped in with a new mandate: “Break into a new market by the end of Q4.” Suddenly, each team’s efforts must serve this singular, timeboxed executive vision. Marketing’s promotion needs to shift if it doesn’t target the new audience. Design’s visuals must reflect a new brand voice. Engineering’s bug fix must consider new user behavior. A new order offer must appeal to potential customers over current customers. Someone is needed to translate, enforce, and prioritize this on behalf of leadership. That’s where the PM steps in.
Now, just as much as the PM is there to deliver these leadership goals to teams, the PM is also supposed to communicate team realities upward. Maybe implementing a new market plan disrupts current efforts that are already driving growth. Maybe the timing is simply too tight. Ideally, the PM could help leadership weigh these tradeoffs, but within the PM’s intermediary function is a structural contradiction. Is it possible to represent diverse teams when proximity to power biases PMs toward executive priorities? In this context, the PM role begins to function more like middle management: accountable upward, while only loosely connected to the realities of day-to-day operations. “Driving alignment” begins to really mean “getting everyone to execute leadership’s vision without resistance.”
This isn’t to say that PMs are consciously complicit in this system. Many, including myself, may approach the role with hopes of driving collaborative power and championing innovative ideas. But the rise of Product Management in its current form reflects a deeper tension in tech: the need to further drive the wedge between product teams and executives. Rather than shifting organizational structure to be more horizontal, companies are more focused on creating senior-level roles that drive insulation over innovation.
If companies were structured more laterally, then the need for a central figure to “drive alignment” would shrink. Coordination would be built into the process, strategy would be co-developed, and information would be transparently shared. If tech is to become more equitable and community-led, the PM role might look entirely different, or disappear altogether. Product planning that is grounded in collective ownership probably wouldn’t necessitate adding a layer to act as translators of executive will, because there would be no executive will.
So where does that leave the question of what exactly a PM does, or could do?
I value coordination, but not when it reinforces hierarchy. My hot take is that product management should be about building spaces where alignment emerges organically. In a way, they should strive to make themselves less essential. As a role often classified as “generalist”, PMs possess – or should possess – the ability to shift from managerial bottleneck to hands-on contributors across diverse teams – stepping in to write copy, sketch up a wireframe, update a graphic, or fix a bug. All while recognizing that the PM role needs to be deliberately replaceable by design if the role is truly fostering the collaboration needed to build resilient teams. In doing so, PMs bring cohesion across functions not by directing from above, but by actively working alongside their teammates.