Why Does Cisco Have No Product Managers?

Jeetu Patel says Cisco has no product managers. It has feature managers who build features for one platform, and the platform is what Cisco sells. Cisco does not sell individual products.

Cisco used to look like a holding company. It had done 250 acquisitions, and people wanted to be general managers, each with their own sales, marketing, product, and engineering. Those managers wanted to grow their own piece and not talk to the others. A $63 billion business then becomes a collection of $100 million businesses, and a customer cannot make sense of that many things to buy. The change was from a holding company to a platform company, so the priority moved from a feature inside one product to becoming part of the larger platform.