We bet you’ve scrolled past this particular kind of LinkedIn post at least once this week: a few slides, bold headers, a punchy caption that promises the ultimate solution to all your product problems. "The only product framework you'll ever need." "I built three unicorns using this one principle." "Stop doing discovery wrong."
Usually, it’s from an account with an enviable follower count, solid engagement, and product experience somewhere in their past, which lends their online presence an air of credibility. The bio might contain a mix of coaching, a Substack, maybe a course or the option to book them as a speaker. You probably know who we’re talking about: the product influencer.
Of course, this isn’t new; every industry has their share of self-styled thought leaders. But what’s different here is the sheer volume of it and what that’s doing to the PM craft.
What does the community think?
We polled our readers and 81% said yes. And that’s just from the segment who haven’t rage-quit LinkedIn altogether (yet).
Speakers at mtpcon London 2026 agreed. Two talks—from WPP Product Director Charity Ibhadon and Sage Director of Product Management Dan Dalton—brought up concerns. Ibhadon argued that product should be fun and it’s not anymore, partly due to rigid frameworks baked into how practitioners think about the role. She traces this back to influencer-produced content, where the entire mechanism is the creation and perpetuation of frameworks, guides, and prescriptive materials about how the work should be done.
Dalton shared some concerning data in his own talk: 58% of the top product management search results in 2025 came from creators with fewer than three years of experience. That means PMs both young and old are picking up frameworks from people who, arguably, haven’t had time to move past basic best practices. Knowledge should always flow both ways—from the experienced to novices and vice-versa—but surely this is taking it a bit too literally.
In online communities, product people have a shared distrust of influencer content, especially when it’s coming from someone with little to no hands-on experience. Respected favourites that consistently come up, such as John Cutler and Teresa Torres, have at least a decade of building and consulting work to back up their claims. Meanwhile, other, less credible names may flaunt short stints in big tech, but their content still fails to gain the trust of a discerning audience.
As one Reddit user put it, “there's only so much cookie cutter wisdom and ‘getting into PM’ stuff you can give. The rare exceptions are people who keep building and pushing and have been doing it for a long time.”
Still, the problem here isn’t that influencers are inherently bad for the discipline. Far from it: some of the most valuable thinking in the field has always come from practitioners willing to openly share their work. The problem is what's happened to the content ecosystem around product management over the past four or five years, and what that's doing to the craft itself.
LinkedIn, layoffs, and personal branding
To understand how we got here, it helps to follow the money—and the timeline. The PM content space really wasn’t saturated until the early 2020s and that’s down to three big factors.
Layoffs
As we’ve reported before, product management has been hit hard. Since hiring peaked in June 2022, the profession has shed 28% or nearly a third of all roles. That means one in five PMs were out of a job by mid-2026.
Tech layoffs overall have also surged over the past four years, peaking at 265,000 workers laid off in 2023. Though things have stabilised somewhat, 2026 (year to date) has recorded 128,873 with a few massive events that saw companies cut double-digit percentages of their staff.
Over the same time period, young people just entering tech have had an exceptionally difficult time getting jobs due to fewer roles, high competition, and something called “seniorisation” (we’ll get back to that later).
It makes sense what many product people did next: they went to LinkedIn, built their personal brand, and monetised what they knew. That's understandable, given the circumstances. The problem, as Dan Dalton argued in his talk, is the content economy isn’t built on a few experts publishing genuinely helpful content at their own pace (usually alongside a day job in product management). What we saw instead was a constant stream of frameworks, certifications, and courses from creators who hadn't earned the right to teach them.
The content creation ecosystem
All this wouldn’t have been possible, however, without an existing content ecosystem. What started as a niche corner of the internet occupied by YouTubers and bloggers evolved into one of the most consequential economic forces of the digital age.
A creator is not simply a person who posts content on a topic they have authority/expertise on, but a micro-entrepreneur running a personal brand, managing a content pipeline, negotiating brand deals, and building community across multiple platforms. Product management influencer content fits neatly into that model. The role is articulate, framework-friendly, and traditionally associated with intelligence and strategic thinking, which are exactly the kind of credentials that translate well into content authority.
LinkedIn now hosts over one billion users (1.2 billion according to Data Reportal), and creator content generates six times more engagement than traditional posts. The incentive to produce content, and to produce it at volume, has never been higher.
Title inflation
The influencer surge appeared in tandem with an interesting change to PM careers themselves: seniorisation. I did promise we would come back to this.
According to Dan Dalton's data, 23% of product leaders now reach Head of Product within two to three years, compared to just 9% in 2015. Career progression has accelerated dramatically, meaning a generation of PMs reached senior positions and began coaching, writing, and teaching before they'd accumulated the experience to back up their advice. In his talk, Dan jokes it’s a bit like learning to fly from someone who's logged a hundred simulator hours and never left the ground.
Some of this is due to the pandemic hiring boom, when people were making senior in three years, staff in four, principal in five—a pace that many describe as title inflation. The people who benefited from that subsequently moved into coaching, content, and consulting, taking their accelerated CVs with them as proof of expertise.
The result is a pattern that product consultant David Pereira calls "the certificate industry": trainers with many badges but no real industry experience, producing certified Product Owners trained by someone who never held that role. The same logic applies further up the chain.
It’s worth reiterating here that none of this is wrong or even surprising, in isolation. A Head of Product with eighteen months in the role who launches a coaching business and a Substack isn't doing anything morally wrong. But when that becomes the dominant mode of knowledge production in a field, something is bound to get lost.
What exactly is the problem then?
The risk with one-size-fits-all frameworks is they could flatten entire categories of genuinely complex problems, giving the impression of a solution while providing little actual guidance to navigate them. If many product influencers don't actually work as PMs themselves, their advice isn't grounded in up-to-date best practices. And as the field is transformed by AI, that gap between prescriptive content and lived practice will only get bigger.
The converse of that also applies: the more AI changes both the lived experience of being a Product Manager and the quantity and quality of content on the topic, the more discernment it takes to tell bad advice from good. In a few years’ time, junior PMs raised on a steady diet of thought-leader content might end up leading with awkward, stale or genuinely counterproductive best practices, all because they started with a flawed foundation.
There's also a compounding effect at the early-career end. Influencer content appeals most to those who are just starting out and not yet experienced enough to know better. They absorb frameworks as gospel before they've had the chance to stress-test them against real products, real teams, and real constraints. The impression they get is shaped by content that, at its worst, might prioritise the appearance of competence over the real thing.
The result is dogma over practice: an overemphasis on how to do the work rather than getting it done at all. This has the potential to transform an industry with thriving communities of practice into one gatekept by jargon and prescriptive content, all to the detriment of the people actually working in it.
Some solutions
It would be wrong to paint a hopeless picture. There are ways to fix this, all within the reach of most product workers.
First of all, let’s establish this as a call for discernment—on the part of both platforms and practitioners—and not a call to dismiss all online product content or public knowledge-sharing as inherently suspect.
Secondly, this is hardly a new problem. Product people have been sounding the alarm on influencer content and its effects for years. In 2023, Beks Yelland, a CPO with two and a half decades of experience, called out the kinds of prescriptive articles that make PMs (especially junior ones) “overthink how they do things.” Two years later, when we followed up with her, she emphasised the need for a pragmatic approach.
“If you make the principles and discipline of product inaccessible – because the art of product has become so complicated, you will disenfranchise your stakeholders and they won't want to work with you,” Beks explained.
Go out and touch grass
For PMs and product leaders, the most useful thing you can do is seek out and connect with peers whose writing and resources are grounded in their own experience of actually managing products. Not frameworks abstracted from practice, but specific, messy, hard-won insight. The more diverse these voices, the better. The good stuff is out there. It's just not always what the algorithm is surfacing.
Also, a perhaps boring reminder to return to best practices over newly-emerged and untested frameworks, even if that gives you FOMO. This applies to platforms, too: prioritising content from people with real experience—even if their personal branding isn't bulletproof, even if they don't post three times a week—is how you maintain the trust of a community that's increasingly cynical about what you’re serving.
We recently heard a talk that resonated with this at mtpcon London 2026: Vonny Laing on how to build products that work in tandem with users, their goals, and their humanity. As she emphasises, sometimes the best advice is the tried and tested: talk to people, learn what they need from your product, why they’re using it, go beyond surface-level wants.
"Give me two people, their train fare, a box of Celebrations, and an excusal from their meetings and they’ll come back with some insights.” That doesn’t require an expensive research programme. "Go out, touch grass, and talk to people," Vonny emphasised.
Product people need each other
This echoes Beks’ advice to PMs struggling to tell apart useful and useless content: become a pragmatic product person. Find a mentor and a community. It goes without saying these should, ideally, be people you interact with at least semi-regularly, not simply a collection of product content creators. However, we understand this can be challenging, especially for those looking for in-person mentorship while based outside of a major tech hub.
It can help to attend conferences, events, or online courses and discussion panels. Online mentor sessions go a long way, too. In any case, don’t be shy about shopping around until you click with someone and feel you can trust them. If you want to dig deeper, you can read our guides to the dos and don’ts of mentorship in product and how to thrive as a mentee once you find someone.
If you’re looking for a product community—either IRL or online—and need a place to start, we have an extensive resources section to help you out. Beks also recommended The Female Product Lead, a community she helped found and which runs a full calendar of events.
Community is one of the Mind the Product’s pillars, which means we’ll always put more trust in the people actively doing product work. This attitude shapes how we think about everything from conference speaker selection to podcasts and the community posts we publish. The tacit knowledge that comes from lived experience (as we've explored in our article defining product sense) is something you have to build up slowly, by doing the work itself.
Over on Reddit, PMs remind each other that often, influencer frameworks and best practices are just isolated cases that worked in a given organisation and might not translate for everyone. “If you can borrow ideas that serve you in real world problems that's wonderful but you need to remember they are selling their product and you are their key user persona not the rest of your org.”
Another user mentioned that, of the most popular influencers, “some have shipped real products at scale, but a lot of the advice feels like ‘content first, substance later’.”
“I’d rather hear from people who have done the job in messy orgs than read polished threads about frameworks,” they added. It seems most of us are tired of overwrought playbooks and prefer applied, hands-on knowledge.
An anecdote from Dan Dalton is pertinent here. In his talk, he remembers how, years ago, he walked into a new Head of Product role with an already-written playbook—”Marty would be proud,” he jokes—and watched it collapse immediately on contact with reality.
“The playbooks aren’t a problem,” he explains. “The problem was it wasn’t my playbook.”
Our verdict
Wrapping up, does product management have an influencer problem? Yes, but it’s actually more of an influencer content problem.
The issue isn’t with a handful of seasoned PMs sharing the frameworks and hard-won lessons work for them, but with a content ecosystem that encourages and rewards the overproduction of guides, frameworks, handbooks, and more, to the detriment of actual practice.
And usually, these don’t even work, which leads to the consumption of even more content, in a kind of vicious loop that keeps practitioners separate from their craft.
