Main idea

Gathering needs, rephrasing them, producing documents, clarifying tickets, coordinating, chasing people, documenting again: a large part of a Product Manager's work builds no product, it catches up on what the organization doesn't circulate on its own. The PM translates permanently between business, tech, design, support and leadership, and absorbs the ambiguities nobody else settles.

That part is genuinely useful — without it, the machine stalls. But it is produced by the state of the organization, not by the nature of the product: it grows with the number of interfaces, the dispersion of information and the vagueness of decisions, and it would disappear if those three improved.

It is a compensation layer, not the core of the role.

That layer has an organizational consequence: it is bulky enough to be carved out and handed to someone else. This is what happened with the Product Owner position, created to absorb the plumbing — holding the backlog, maintaining the relationship with the developers, following releases — while someone else designs. Compensation then becomes a job, with its title and its hiring, and the friction that produced it stops being seen as a defect to correct.

Layer added by "The PO Is Not a Job, It's a Function — and AI Doesn't Change That, It Accelerates It" (2026-08-03).

Why it matters

Naming that part makes it measurable and open to attack. As long as it stays indistinct from the rest, it is experienced as the job, and anything that reduces it reads as giving up.

It also changes where to look for gains: a coordination friction is treated first at the level of the organization that produces it, and only then at the level of the PM who compensates for it.

Nuances and limits

The boundary isn't clean. Rephrasing a need sometimes uncovers the real problem, and a well-placed follow-up can be worth a decision: what looks like plumbing sometimes produces understanding.

And in some organizations, that compensation is precisely the value expected of the position — removing it doesn't free up time, it leaves a hole.

Open questions

• Over a real working week, how do you tell apart what compensates for a friction from what moves the product forward?