Research and Perspective

Managing Without Authority: Power, Identity, and Coordination in Product Management

My honors thesis examines product management as an organizational role defined by high responsibility, cross-functional dependence, and limited formal authority.

Role: Sociology Honors Thesis
Category: Research and Perspective
Timeframe: 2026 — 2027
Status: Research in progress

Honors thesis

Project Context

The study connects sociology of work and organizations with contemporary product management. It investigates how product managers construct legitimacy, navigate professional identity, coordinate specialists, and gain access to decision-making without direct command authority.

This case study documents the research question, theoretical framing, methodology, interview design, and analytical plan. It does not present findings that have not yet been collected or analyzed.

Research problem

Responsibility without command authority

Product management is often described through methods and frameworks, but less often examined as a social role shaped by authority, expertise, identity, and institutional expectations.

Research questions

What gives a PM the right to lead?

The study treats influence as an organizational and sociological problem rather than assuming that stakeholder management is simply an individual communication skill.

Primary question

How do product managers exercise influence and assert role legitimacy within cross-functional teams despite lacking direct managerial authority?

Role identity

How do product managers describe what their role is, and how does that differ from the way engineers, designers, analysts, and other collaborators understand it?

Influence

Which interpersonal, relational, organizational, and knowledge-based strategies do product managers use to gain cooperation and buy-in?

Organizational structure

How do startup, enterprise, centralized, and decentralized environments alter expectations of the product-management role?

Conflict

How do product managers navigate disagreement, accountability, and conflict when they are responsible for outcomes but cannot rely on formal command authority?

Analytical dimensions

Breaking influence into observable forms of work.

Authority and legitimacy

How product managers establish credibility, justify decisions, and gain cooperation without relying primarily on formal hierarchy.

Occupational identity

How practitioners define product management as a role, profession, craft, function, or form of leadership.

Cross-functional coordination

How product managers bridge different languages, priorities, incentives, and definitions of success across specialized teams.

Organizational structure

How hierarchy, informal networks, company size, and organizational culture shape what product managers are expected and permitted to do.

Conflict and accountability

How responsibility is assigned when decisions fail, alignment breaks down, or a product manager cannot secure agreement.

Professional socialization

How product managers learn unwritten norms such as reading a room, navigating politics, building trust, and making invisible work legible.

Theoretical framework

Product management as a sociological role.

The theoretical framework connects classical questions of authority and labor with contemporary research on identity, professions, institutional structure, and post-bureaucratic work.

Max Weber · Andrew Abbott

Authority and legitimacy

Examines the difference between holding a formal title and being treated as someone whose direction is legitimate.

Georg Simmel · Snow and Anderson

Interaction and identity work

Frames the PM role as something continually explained, performed, defended, and negotiated through interaction.

Anthony Giddens

Structuration

Connects individual PM behavior with the organizational rules and resources that both constrain and reproduce the role.

Maravelias · Grey and Garsten · Hales · Vie · Hodgson

Post-bureaucratic control

Explores how autonomy, trust, expertise, and informal coordination can coexist with persistent systems of managerial control.

Boltanski and Chiapello

The new spirit of capitalism

Situates flexible, project-based, networked work within broader shifts in how modern organizations justify control and participation.

DiMaggio and Powell

Institutional expectations

Examines how organizations adopt recognizable PM structures and language even when the role operates differently in practice.

Abbott · Bechky

Division of expert labor

Studies how professional groups negotiate boundaries, expertise, ownership, and shared meaning across specialized work.

Marx · McKenna, Garcia-Lorenzo, and Bridgman

Labor and managerial identity

Connects responsibility, control, visibility, and managerial identity to the labor product managers perform.

Working proposition

Product management may represent a form of post-bureaucratic coordination in which responsibility remains centralized while the authority required to fulfill that responsibility becomes relational, distributed, and continually negotiated.

Literature architecture

Connecting sociology with the professional story PM tells about itself.

The source base is intentionally interdisciplinary. Sociology explains power, authority, identity, labor, and professional boundaries. Organizational research explains project-based and collaborative structures. Product literature reveals how the field defines its own role, responsibilities, and standards.

Sociology of work and organizations

Provides theories of authority, legitimacy, identity, expertise, control, professional boundaries, and post-bureaucratic coordination.

Abbott
Barley and Kunda
Bechky
Boltanski and Chiapello
DiMaggio and Powell
Giddens
Grey and Garsten
Hales
Hodgson
Maravelias
McKenna et al.
Snow and Anderson
Vie

Organizational and managerial research

Connects the PM role to project-based organizing, managerial work, collaborative capacity, governance, and operational control.

Mintzberg
Turner and Keegan
Barker Scott and Manning
Leite, Faria, and Azevedo

Product-management discourse

Establishes the professional language through which the industry describes PM responsibility, process, value creation, and career progression.

Bavaro and McDowell
Cagan
Perri
Olsen
Product School
Luck
Pessemier and Root
Staudt

Methodology

Studying the role through lived experience

I am developing an IRB-approved qualitative interview study grounded in organizational sociology and product-management literature. The research connects practitioners’ lived experiences to broader questions about power and coordination.

Participant design

Studying both sides of the relationship.

A PM-only sample could reproduce the profession’s preferred self-description. Including cross-functional collaborators makes legitimacy, value, and role boundaries open empirical questions.

Track A

Product managers

Capture how PMs understand their own role, construct credibility, exercise influence, handle conflict, and learn the role’s informal rules.

Role background and identity
Authority, influence, and legitimacy
Cross-functional coordination
Organizational structure
Conflict and accountability
Professional socialization

Track B

Cross-functional collaborators

Compare PM self-understanding with the outside view of engineers, designers, analysts, and other collaborators.

Perceived value of product management
Role overlap and boundary disputes
Pushback and cooperation
Technical or creative credibility
Relative organizational influence
Distribution of accountability

Interview protocol

Turning abstract concepts into questions about actual work.

The semi-structured protocol moves from role background into concrete experiences of influence, coordination, conflict, organizational structure, and professional learning. Follow-up probes encourage participants to describe specific events rather than relying only on generalized opinions.

Section

Theme

Core analytical question

Role background and identity

What do product managers believe the role is, and when do they feel required to explain or defend it?

Authority, influence, and legitimacy

What do PMs rely on when they need action from someone who does not report to them?

Coordination and translation

How do PMs bridge different priorities, professional languages, and definitions of success?

Organizational structure

How do hierarchy, informal networks, company type, and leadership expectations reshape the role?

Conflict, labor, and accountability

Who becomes responsible when alignment fails or a product decision produces a poor outcome?

Professional socialization

How do PMs learn skills and norms that rarely appear in formal training or job descriptions?

The collaborator view

How do engineers, designers, analysts, and others evaluate PM value, credibility, and influence?

30–60 min

Target interview length

2 tracks

PM and collaborator protocols

Numeric codes

Confidential analysis identifiers

Research principles

Designing against an easy conclusion.

The study begins with a theoretical interest in influence without authority, but the research design must remain capable of finding formal power, role redundancy, hierarchy, or disagreement with the premise.

Experience before abstraction

Questions ask participants to describe specific situations before inviting them to generalize about authority, credibility, or collaboration.

Multiple perspectives

The study includes both product managers and the people who work alongside them so the role is not defined only through PM self-description.

Structure and agency

Questions examine both individual strategies and the organizational conditions that make those strategies necessary or effective.

Conflict as evidence

Moments of disagreement, failed alignment, challenged legitimacy, and unclear accountability reveal how authority operates in practice.

Confidentiality by design

Responses are separated from participant names and analyzed through numeric identifiers to reduce professional and organizational risk.

No predetermined conclusion

The interview guide is informed by theory, but the analysis remains open to experiences that complicate the idea that PMs simply lead through soft power.

Analysis plan

From interview accounts to sociological explanation.

Interview material will undergo thematic analysis informed by grounded-theory principles. The goal is to identify recurring patterns while comparing differences across role perspective, organizational structure, seniority, and professional context.

01
Transcription and preparation
Prepare interview material for analysis while removing or separating personally identifying information.
02
Initial coding
Identify recurring descriptions of influence, credibility, role ambiguity, translation, conflict, and organizational constraint.
03
Focused thematic analysis
Consolidate initial codes into broader themes connected to power, identity, coordination, labor, and legitimacy.
04
Perspective comparison
Compare PM accounts with collaborator accounts to identify alignment, divergence, and occupational boundary disputes.
05
Structural comparison
Evaluate whether themes differ across startups, larger firms, industries, seniority levels, and organizational structures.
06
Theoretical interpretation
Connect empirical patterns to sociological theories while preserving findings that do not fit the initial framework.

Theoretical concepts will guide interpretation, but they will not function as a closed coding system. Themes that challenge or fall outside the initial framework remain analytically important.

Expected contribution

Making invisible coordination visible.

The completed thesis is intended to contribute to sociology while offering a more rigorous account of product-management work for organizational and professional audiences.

Empirical

Produce first-hand qualitative accounts of how product managers and their collaborators experience authority, coordination, and role legitimacy.

Theoretical

Extend sociological discussion of authority and post-bureaucratic work through a contemporary role defined by responsibility without direct command.

Organizational

Identify how company structure, role clarity, accountability systems, and functional relationships shape PM effectiveness.

Professional

Offer a more sociologically grounded account of PM work than procedural descriptions focused only on roadmaps, prioritization, and agile methods.

Current state

Research architecture established. Fieldwork and analysis ahead.

Completed

Honors thesis proposal
Primary and supporting research questions
Preliminary theoretical framework
Interdisciplinary research source list
Separate PM and collaborator interview protocols
Consent, recording, confidentiality, and closing procedures
Planned thematic-analysis approach
Initial recruitment and research preparation

Complete participant recruitment
Conduct semi-structured interviews
Transcribe and securely prepare interview data
Develop and refine the qualitative codebook
Compare PM and collaborator perspectives
Analyze variation across company structures
Draft findings and theoretical discussion
Complete and defend the thesis by spring 2027

Evidence boundaries

A research design is not a finding.

The portfolio can document the quality and intentionality of the research process now while reserving empirical claims for the completed collection and analysis.

What I can claim

The research question and study design are established
The literature base spans sociology, organizational research, and PM discourse
The interview protocol covers both PM and collaborator perspectives
The study is designed for qualitative thematic analysis
The thesis is currently in progress

What I am not claiming yet

That product managers universally lack meaningful authority
That influence without authority is always collaborative or benign
That startup and enterprise PM roles differ in one predictable way
That PMs and collaborators agree on the role’s value
That any major themes have already been established
That the thesis has reached final conclusions

Research perspective

Influence is not the absence of power.

It is a form of organizational work whose resources, constraints, legitimacy, and consequences can be studied.

Product management offers a useful setting for examining how contemporary organizations distribute responsibility while relying on expertise, relationships, persuasion, narrative, process, and informal authority to coordinate specialized labor. The completed thesis will test how practitioners and collaborators experience that arrangement rather than assuming the industry’s preferred description is accurate.

Credits