Brand Men (The McElroy Memo)

A three-page internal memo written in May 1931 by Neil McElroy at Procter & Gamble, proposing that each brand should have a dedicated team responsible for every aspect of its marketing. The memo is the closest thing product management has to an origin document: many of the roles, accountabilities and team structures still in use today descend from its argument, translated across decades from consumer goods into software. Reading the original is humbling — the problem McElroy was solving (internal products cannibalising each other, diluted focus, no single owner) is older than every product management framework on the market. It is also a masterclass in institutional rhetoric: three pages that reorganised an industry.