The Evolving Role of a Product Manager in Engineering Teams

What Happened to the Product Manager?

The role of a Product Manager keeps evolving, and the expectations for this position are shifting—sometimes even shrinking, at least from the perspective of engineering teams.

Back in the day, a Product Manager was the person responsible for crafting tickets, complete with detailed acceptance criteria. That’s not the case anymore.

In the first wave of change, PMs started preparing just the skeleton of tickets, leaving the rest for the team to flesh out. Now? Some Product Managers don’t even bring tickets to meetings—and that’s perfectly fine. Why? Because when you’re building a product-oriented mindset in your teams (think user-centric development or “product engineers”), the old rigid roles just don’t apply.

The takeaway?
Embrace this shift. Let your engineers co-own the product vision; it’s not the PM’s job to spoon-feed every detail.

This article was originally published on https://craftengineer.com/. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.

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