You're Not the CEO of the Product: Rants of a PM
The most common thing I hear about the Product Manager job is that you are in effect a CEO of the product. My hottest take is this is about the furthest you could get from the truth in 99% of the cases of Product Managers. Some Product Managers do have the divine mandate to do whatever they want with their product, but almost none of the rest of us do. Here's the simplest differences...
CEOs have real power As a Product Manager, we talk about the art of persuasion and influencing - essentially getting people to do what you want by wanting to do it themselves. This isn't to say that CEOs don't have to spend most of their time persuading and influencing, but when a decision comes down to the wire, I've been CEOs turn their company, strategy, and team on a dime to accomplish a goal. As a Product Manager, you will never have that power.
CEOs control the P/L CEOs are obsessed with the bottom line of their company, in addition to their products and services (doubly so for public companies). Almost no Product Manager has this level of control or responsibility. I would challenge anyone working in a Product job or interviewing for a Product job to find the profit and loss for your product. Most likely you will be sent on a quest of Indiana Jones proportions to find this information like it is a lost relic guarded by the religious Excel zealots of finance.
CEOs aren't bogged down in the details At large corporations, the first thing you find yourself being taught is to simplify, simplify, simplify when talking to upper management. Again, this is drastically different at a chosen few companies, but for the vast majority of Product Managers you will find as you go up your ability to go into the technical details must get much simpler. You have to be mired in the small details with the ability to see the larger strategy, but CEOs must be focused on the broader implications for years to come. While they may not be the Bene Gesserit of Dune measuring their plans in centuries, your feature to simplify the onboarding of customers with an A/B test is a drop in the bucket.
To sum it all up, take a look at George R. R. Martin's famous passage from Game of Thrones - "Any man who must say I am king, is no king." If you have to declare you're a CEO, then you probably aren't. Your function is important, but it serves a different function than CEO and by declaring Product Managers are CEOs we introduce more conflict between teams and create a host of annoying influencers that try to sell classes on second rate podcasts.