Generally, I am thinking of success in 3 dimensions: Vision, People and Execution. All three need to work well for a team to succeed over time. Early in your career Execution takes a bit of a higher focus. You can get your first 2-3 promotions by launching bigger and more complex projects. However, as you grow in your career the ability to offer broader, more ambitious vision and have others join you in the journey become more central for your success. Your already proven execution skills help in attracting people to work with you since they know you will deliver. It’s important to invest in all three dimensions throughout your career, since honing these skills takes time. When I joined Meta I was excited to find out that here we are formally aligning PMs expectations with similar axes: Impact (which includes Strategy and Execution) and Capacity Building (which includes healthy team and cross functional relationship as well as broader contributions to the organization). I believe this structured view creates the right incentive and culture.

As you progress from PM to senior PM, competencies in these 3 areas should grow: Autonomy💪🏽, Scope 🌫️ and Leadership 🙋 . There are a few clear indications that someone is ready for the senior level, like increased scope, being a reliable partner and being results driven. Here are some less obvious ones: #1 You recommend initiatives based on your strategic evaluation, instead of waiting for them to be handed to you. You are influential in your field and feel confident putting forward these initiatives. #2 You leverage relationships across the org. You can drive results from partners outside of your immediate team. You are fully entrusted to tackle complex, multi-team problems with little necessary supervision. #3 You are seen as an available and trustworthy mentor and actively seek out opportunities to help others be their best. This is my favorite by far. What are the key stages that distinguish the different levels of PMs? I think a little bit of this depends on the problem space and company. In my mind, PMs are professional collaborators, strategic assassins and bring out the best in their peers. If you can look yourself in the mirror and say you’re doing these things at scale, well, I’d say you're on the right track.

There's a lot written about basic PM competencies (https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/), and for any PM on my team, they should be able to do all these things you'd expect from a PM (write specs, understand the customer, communicate upwards and outwards, GSD). I'll focus my answer on a few attributes that I think are really "make-or-break" for me: * Good communication skills, both written and verbal, are an absolute must-have for any PM on my team. Whether it's through writing specs, influencing stakeholders, or pitching product ideas, PMs have to be able to communicate effectively across mediums (written, verbal), forums (large groups vs. small groups vs 1:1) and audiences (to developers, marketers, sales, executives). In particular, they need to be able to tell good stories (e.g.,, can they get their team inspired about an idea?), structure their communication effectively (e.g., can break down ambiguous problems using a framework?) and make technical concepts easy to understand for non-technical folks (e.g., can they explain how routers work to someone without a CS background?) * Great PMs "own" the problem. They're not afraid the step outside the boundaries of their function to do what it takes to get the product out the door. They rarely ever use phrases like "that's not my job" or "this was the designer/developers responsibility". Their strong sense of ownership of the problem leads them to passionately debate about the right solution, speak truth to power when necessary, but also be open to other points of view (because it's not about "them", it's about solving the problem).

I have a very simple framework for building 0-1 product - IVC framework 1. Identify: * The first step in developing any product or feature is to identify the user's needs. Hence, your goal should be to talk to as many users as you possibly can to understand what they say, do, think, and feel. This also helps you learn who you are solving for and who you are not solving for and create a problem statement 2. Validate * Building Conviction by testing Discovery, MVP, market analysis, possible conversion. During this time also you should be talking to customers to validate the problem and solution 3. Create: * Create the right team to build the product and also a plan on how you will bring the product to market.

Objectives and Key Results are meant to encourage cross-functional alignment and collaboration. In product management, it is essential to think of OKRs as a method for prioritizing scope that will help drive the top business KPIs, so that your product roadmap has a built-in mechanism for considering how to help the business succeed. The below example is one I have seen work well: * Top Level Business Objective: Increase enterprise ARR by 20% * Product Key Result: Deliver paid feature X to help compete and close 3 sales pipeline deals * Product Key Result: Implement use case documentation for paid features to support Field Team

In my mind, it's not an either-or. By growing existing talent, you retain organizational knowledge and build a shared culture, while bringing in external hires inject fresh perspectives and sometimes specialized skills lacking within a PM team. When I am looking at my team structure and needs, I often consider the following: Things to Consider: 1. Internal Development Programs: Promote from within by offering training, mentorship, and rotational programs that broaden your team's exposure. This approach (in my experience) strengthens loyalty, develops institutional knowledge, and keeps your product strategy consistent. 2. Hire Externally: Often times PM teams get into stuck patterns and fresh perspectives are invaluable for a team's growth. When I need new capabilities, like a strong data analytics background, or experience in a specific market segment, hiring from outside will usually shorten the learning curve and bring proven experience to the team. This ultimately helps the broader team as their exposure to these new skills raises everybody's value and potential. 3. Do Both: We need to do both internal development and external talent acquisition to manage the best possible team. Keep growing your internal team by providing new opportunities and challenges, while selectively recruiting outside talent to fill knowledge gaps and bring in fresh eyes. This way, I keep our internal culture strong, ensure continuity / grow loyalty and still gain a fresh perspective when you need it.

I love this question because it flips one of the previous questions to focus more on the individual. IMO the success of a Technical Product/Program Manager largely lies in the ‘What’ and the ‘How’. What impact did they have? This individual measure of success should be tied to the business (product or platform) goals. The TPM should directly be held accountable for delivering on those goals. This is also the (relatively) easy part to measure (Eg: How many new users signed up for the app?, How much incremental revenue did the feature bring?, Did the platform ship on time?“ How did they land that impact? This is the ‘hard to measure’ part. For a TPM it is equally important to demonstrate leadership qualities such as - high EQ, deep Empathy, Conflict resolution, crisp communication, ability to influence without authority etc and overall be a kind and respectful individual. Often peer feedback has proven to be an effective means to gather these signals.

I think the best way to break into the industry as a PM is to get after building tech products yourself. Personally, I left a well-paying job in the energy sector to work on a start-up with no reliable paycheck. Thinking back on that experience, it was crazy beneficial to learn how to work with designers & engineers to build a great product or feature. The act of building a product or feature is the best teacher. I’m not advocating that you should quit your job and not get paid to build stuff like I did! There was a lot that wasn’t so awesome about that. 😅 But I definitely WOULD encourage everyone here to think about how you could do that in your spare time. What problems are you passionate about solving? What kind of product or feature could help you solve that problem? How could you bring that solution to life? How can you talk to prospective customers about it? Even PM candidates that make wireframes or prototypes to show a product that solves a real problem have a leg up over most of the other candidates. I’ll take someone with drive, initiative and passion for the work 10 times out of 10.

Perhaps a contrarian take, but technical skills aren't the most critical for the majority of PM roles out there, except for deeply technical products or platform positions. For the general PM role, it's much more important to demonstrate your ability to delve into customer problems, set strategy, execute, and drive impact that aligns with your organization's mission and vision. Technical skills matter, but they are secondary. They usually revolve around your ability to work with engineering counterparts and understand enough technical concepts to make trade-offs, and to work with data and perform analysis for decision-making. In my experience, both of these skills are often inquired about directly.

Ideas can come from many places. They include customer feedback calls, customer troubleshooting sessions, customer submitted ideas (at Splunk, we have an idea submission portal called ideas.splunk.com), conferences (at Splunk, we host .conf where we have the opportunity to meet many customers in person), ideas from your engineering team (they generate some of the best ideas), and ideas you dream up yourself. Once there’s a list of ideas, we typically do a full re-prioritization at annual planning. Throughout the year, we also slot in new ideas and do minor re-prioritization as things change.