Quite often I see job ads where the title says Product Manager. The description mentions Project Manager. The requirements read more like a Marketing Specialist’s day. And the rate is the one you’d pay a CRM operator.
This is what a junk drawer looks like. You can drop almost anything into the words “product manager” now — as long as it happens somewhere between business, marketing, the platform and the tickets.
I can measure this, roughly. I use a tool that watches new job postings and emails me the ones matching my filters. I use it as a feed and nothing else. It can send proposals for me automatically, but I don’t use that part, because a proposal I did not write is not worth sending.
One of my filters is set on skills instead of the title. It is by far the noisiest one I have. In the last few weeks it delivered a resume writer, an accountant with ERP experience, a QA engineer for a mobile app, an experienced recruter, a tutor and a virtual assistant. Every one of those ads had “product manager” sitting in it somewhere. In the skills, in the description, sometimes in the title itself.
That is what a blurry word does. It stops working as a filter. Software cannot separate these jobs, because the people writing the ads have not separated them either. A blurry title, a blurry hire. The client hires for one job and needs another. The person applying signs up for one thing and ends up doing something else.
And no, this is not wounded pride. The confusion costs something real. The client hires for one job and needs another. The person applying signs up for one thing and ends up doing something else. Both sides feel a little cheated, and neither can say exactly why.
My LinkedIn feed has answers – different infographics. PO vs PM vs BA, three tidy columns, nicely designed (half of them drawn with AI now). I scroll past. Not because they’re wrong — they’re usually fine — but because they’re shared among people who already know the difference. The person who wrote the confusing ads is not reading them.
There are at least four different jobs hiding under one tired word:
- Someone who makes product decisions. Understands the problem, the users, the constraints. Weighs risks, priorities, trade-offs. Decides what to build — and, harder, what not to.
- Someone who turns uncertainty into work a team can build. Requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, a sequenced backlog. Takes something vague and makes it clear enough that engineers don’t have to guess.
- Someone who keeps delivery moving. Sprints, releases, bug triage, chasing the items that stalled. I read one ad recently that listed five responsibilities, and exactly one of them was product work. The other four were coordination. That is a Delivery Manager. It is a real job and it already has a name.
- Someone who runs launches, funnels and automations. Thinkific, GoHighLevel, Zapier, landing pages, email sequences. This is real, skilled work. It is just not the same job — and calling it “product management” helps no one, least of all the person doing it.
And that is the tidy version. Here is the untidy one. Every ad below reached me through filters set for product management work, and none of them turned out to be it.
| What the ad was called | What the job actually was |
|---|---|
| Director of Operations / Product Manager | Nine responsibilities, not one of them product. First required skill: sales coaching. “Product management” appeared only in the tags. |
| Product / Delivery Manager | One of five responsibilities was product work. The rest was release coordination, testing, and chasing whatever had stalled. |
| Founding Product Lead | A designer. Production-ready Figma files, Figma portfolio required. |
| Build a SaaS platform, MVP to long-term product | A developer. Subscriptions, authentication, responsive build. |
| Product Marketing Manager | Marketing. Positioning, go-to-market, funnels, referral channels. |
| Product Manager for a membership site | Wireframes, hiring a developer, conversion optimisation. The required skills included a CSS preprocessor. |
In every one of them “product management” sat quietly in the skills tags while the description described something else.
There is a fifth thing in this picture, and it is not a job at all. It is a belief. Some clients look at how fast a PRD can be produced now and quietly decide: if the documents got cheap, the profession must have got cheap too.
I’ll be straight — I generate documents with AI myself. I draft in an hour what used to take a day. Which is exactly why I can say it: the document was never the hard part.
A PRD can be beautifully formatted and completely wrong. A roadmap can be clean, confident, and pointed at the wrong problem. AI made the artifact cheap. It did nothing to the judgment underneath — whether the thing you are specifying is worth building at all. If anything, that judgment got more valuable, because now everyone can make the document with a ready-made AI skill, and far fewer can tell when it is wrong.
There is one more role worth naming, and it is not a misuse of the title. A Forward Deployed Engineer sits next to a business team, works out the problem with them, builds the solution and ships it, with no product manager in the middle. The four jobs above are the title stretched to cover cheaper work. This one is different: it does part of my job, and it does it fast. That makes the remaining question sharper, not weaker — someone still has to ask whether the thing built quickly was worth building at all. I wrote about that separately here.
So I don’t really have advice here. Just this: the junk drawer is annoying when you’re stuck in it, but it turns out to be a filter too. The people who can tell these four apart — quickly, without a diagram — are the ones I want to work with.
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