If you think back to less automated times, management was the programming —- you built instructions and procedures that allowed organisation to scale and improve your end product.

The only thing that changed is that now instructions and procedures are oftentimes executed by software and hardware, not by actual human beings. Hence the use of software engineering wing, in addition to your usual, sorry for the lack of better word, “meat programmers” aka organisational execs.

Interestingly, the end result customers get has not changed, despite many people coloring it that way. People still get same cup of coffee or a taxi ride, just quicker/cheaper/marginally better. But such incremental improvements were achievable in the business world before IT era using same exact means, through internal product management and imrovement of org procedures, applied to people and processes instead of pieces of software.