Producer Not Manager: Title Shapes Behavior

“The big changes to team structure paired with smaller, atmospheric changes. For instance, the team opted to call the product role—whose work involved a mix of strategy, analytics, and operations—“ producers” instead of the more traditional “product managers.” “The word manager had acquired this negative connotation,” explained Sacks. “To call them ‘product managers’ would imply that their job was just to ‘manage things’ as opposed to ‘make things happen.’”

““When I joined PayPal, it’s like no one tells me how to do things,” He remarked. “They just throw me questions. Question after question. And I just figured out how to answer the question. The whole company was... no nonsense.””