[alphazard]

People like to point to shining examples of Product Managers adding huge amounts of value. They are like Unicorns, and you will probably never encounter one in your career. Moreover, many companies are unable to setup a hiring pipeline that can reliably detect such individuals. So hiring for the role Product Manager is a net negative for most companies, because their odds of hiring a good one are basically 0.

The result is that Product Manager is mostly an imposter role. It's created by charismatic "business" people to insert themselves into an area of value creation. They are attracted to the light and heat that tech has been giving off. Once they are in, they promulgate the idea that the role is absolutely necessary for success and create more demand for hiring similar imposter roles. The necessity of these roles is now part of the conventional wisdom.

As an imposter role, anyone well liked, with enough confidence can pivot into it. Areas with clear metrics for success like demand generation have seen cuts. But the success of a product manager is more difficult to quantify, and so it's a good place to jump to.

[kirso]

How is it difficult? Each product has a metric / OKRs behind it and if it doesn't then something is really really wrong.

Can hardly see an argument of everyone pivoting based on loudness and charisma. People would usually fail here on analytics, design or even technical questions of data flows.

[alphazard]

Product quality is difficult to measure. Even if it was easy to measure (as you seem to claim), it's difficult to know if a improvement in metrics is attributable to the product manager or some other factor. There are a lot of forces driving product evolution.

Contrast that to metrics around demand generation. If you have a sales team, they can work "how did you hear about us" into the conversation. Maybe you are tracking where redirects to the website come from. It's much easier for a marketer to prove that 100 prospects got in touch as a result of something they did, than for a product manager to prove the product is better because of them.