MAGAZINE ARTICLE¹

Product managers have taken well-earned bows for the success of many outstanding companies. They have received-and they deserve-the credit for steering many well-known products to market-share leadership and high profitability in the face of today's intense, competitive scramble. In many large, complex multiproduct corporations, the product manager has provided the vigorous product-by-product leadership that the top executives of a smaller, more tightly knit company give to its one basic product line.

It com.es as no surprise, then, to find a recent survey disclosing that three out of four companies in its sample are using this organizational concept. What is surprising, however is the current surge of dissatisfaction with the way product managers and the product manager concept are working out.

Do these complaints-and their number is increasing-lead to the conclusion that the product manager concept itself is not practical? Certainly not, for the many instances where it is still working well demonstrate that it is not only a sound concept, but in many ways an indispensable one. It is because of the soundness of the concept that it works in so many cases. Where it fails, the fault, almost invariably, lies in how management has gone about applying-or misapplying-a basically sound management tool.

¹B. Charles Ames, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1963