Brand Men (The McElroy Memo)
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neil_Mcelroy%27s_1931_Brand_Man_Memo.pdf ↗
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.
Central argument
McElroy argues that Procter & Gamble's internal brand conflicts—products from the same company competing against each other without coordination—stem from a structural problem: no single person owns a brand end-to-end. His solution is a dedicated brand unit with a Brand Man at its center, accountable for sales performance, field feedback, promotional strategy, and competitive response, supported by a small team beneath him. The memo is less a philosophical manifesto than an operational fix: assign clear ownership, and diffuse accountability disappears.
Critique
The model McElroy proposes is built entirely around internal competition as the primary organizational threat, which made sense in a portfolio of soap brands but quietly smuggles in a set of assumptions—that brands are discrete, rivalrous, and best managed in silos—that can be corrosive in digital products where platform interdependencies and shared infrastructure require exactly the cross-brand coordination he was trying to route around. The Brand Man structure solves the problem of diluted ownership while potentially creating the problem of local optimization: each team wins for its product while the system as a whole loses coherence.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO designing team topology, the memo offers a useful stress test: can you name one person who owns the outcome for each product area, or is accountability distributed across functions in a way that would have frustrated McElroy ninety years ago? The harder lesson is that the brand management model he invented eventually calcified at P&G into exactly the kind of rigid, defensive structure it was meant to prevent—a warning that clear ownership models need governance mechanisms to stop them from becoming fiefdoms as the product portfolio matures.