Software product management, by and large, descends from consumer goods product managers. The idea of a wholistic product owner, market analyst and in house success engineer comes from Procter and Gamble and other consumer brands. Except in games. In games they are called Producer, in an analogy to movies. Essentially the same kind of job, both in the same medium, just different genres. Weird right?
I believe this is a result of software being a relatively adolescent medium, which borrowed pre-existing metaphors, jobs and work patterns and gradually grind them into the right shape for software. So, yeah, being a software PM is like making a consumer product, or even a b2b product, not that different from any other business. But it also is like being a movie producer or director, leading a collective commercial creative endeavor to deliver a media experience. I want to throw a third out there: the show runner. http://www.showrunnersthemovie.com
Show runners are the driving force and final editorial voice of modern TV. The prestige TV renaissance, with its serial dramas and long form complex narratives, is all made possible by show runners. Like PMs they combine leadership, creative strategy, and ultimate ownership of success. Sound familiar?
So what? Why does it matter? Because, as a similar, but different job, show runners have things to teach us: tools and patterns we could import, heroes to emulate or failures to avoid. But not just show runners. Cool as they are, my larger hope is that as software development evolves and continues to mature and that software Product Management will become its own thing, even if it borrows its names, and its tools, from many sources.