🗺️The Greats

In 1979, Sony's product planning staff tested the idea of a portable tape player with no recording button and no speakers, and market research came back skeptical: why would anyone buy a tape recorder that couldn't record? Morita overruled the consensus, wanting a way to listen to music while walking. The Walkman launched in July 1979, sold out its first production run within weeks, and went on to sell over 200 million units worldwide across later decades.

Frustrated by product managers who blamed engineering, sales or 'the market' whenever a product underperformed, Horowitz wrote a short internal memo at Netscape around 1997 arguing that a good product manager takes full responsibility for a product's success and operates like a company's CEO, while a bad one makes excuses and waits for direction. Employees kept forwarding it long after Horowitz left Netscape, and he eventually republished it on his own blog, where it remains one of the field's most shared texts.

In 1993, at Easel Corporation, Sutherland pulled together a small team and structured their work in short, fixed cycles with a single person responsible for ordering what got built next — borrowing the term 'scrum' from a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka comparing fast product teams to a rugby scrum. He and Ken Schwaber presented the resulting framework at the OOPSLA conference in 1995, the first time it was described in public.

As Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience, Mayer became known for testing minute design details with real user data rather than opinion — most famously ordering a 2009 test of 41 different shades of blue for search-result links to see which generated more clicks. The winning shade was reportedly adopted, an anecdote still cited in product-management courses as an extreme, sometimes mocked example of how far data-driven product decisions can go inside a large technology company.

Google's leadership had already debated and set aside building a browser once, wary of a costly fight with Microsoft, before Pichai and colleagues pitched it again with a specific product idea: a browser fast and simple enough to act as a launchpad for web applications rather than just a viewer. Chrome shipped in September 2008; within a few years it had overtaken Internet Explorer to become the world's most-used browser, evidence inside Google that a persistent product manager can revive an idea leadership had already turned down once.

In September 1998, Wojcicki rented her garage in Menlo Park, California, to two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used it as Google's first office. She joined the company the following year as its first marketing manager and helped launch AdWords, Google's advertising product. In 2006, she was among the executives who pushed Google's leadership to acquire the then-struggling video site YouTube for $1.65 billion, a deal she later ran as YouTube's CEO from 2014 to 2023.

While tutoring university classmates in graphic design software in Perth, Australia, Perkins noticed students spending entire semesters just learning where the buttons were in professional tools, long before they designed anything good. She and Cliff Obrecht first tested that insight with Fusion Books, an online yearbook-design tool, in 2007, then pitched a broader version — Canva — to more than 100 investors, many in Silicon Valley, before securing funding; Canva launched publicly in 2013.