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).

The transition from a Sr Product Manager role to a director level usually focuses on developing your strategic thinking, influencing others across the organization, and guiding larger portfolio decisions. In other words, you’ll need to grow from an execution-based mindset to that of one centered on longer-term vision, team leadership, and effective decision-making (at scale). In my experience, these are the key areas that one should focus on. Skill Sets to Develop: 1. Strategic Vision & Storytelling: Climbing up the ladder isn’t just about managing more product roadmaps; it’s about defining the strategy and market direction, gaining a deeper understanding of the business strategy and how it relates to long-term execution plans and anticipating future market needs. A key bit of being at a higher level of telling that story and connecting those dots for others. Be good at explaining what the strategy is and why it's the right path for your organization. If you can't bring people along the journey, you will never get their full support. 2. Stakeholder Management: The higher you go, the more internal and external stakeholder management you will have. In lower levels that's more at a feature level management, but at a Director level, it's more about strategy implications and trade-offs with your stakeholders. 3. Leadership & Talent Development: Typically at the Director level or above is managing a team of Product Managers. For me, I have been managing Product Mgrs for nearly a decade and find it one of the most rewarding parts of the role. Growing a team of strong product thinkers and empowering them to execute efficiently is a huge part of moving up that corporate ladder. 4. Process Process Process As you move up, you need to ensure your team has the tools and processes in place to support them. You are less in the weeds each day and thus have to ensure that you have enabled them with a framework to follow that will make them successful in their careers and drive your product forward. However, I despise process for the sake of process (a common issue at larger organizations). Be willing to challenge a process that isn't adding value and ensure that what you drive provides your team the room to grow. I like to think of it as guardrails for my team. I don't tell them specifically what to do and a playbook/process to follow letter by letter. I provide them with guidance and point them down the right path with some guardrails to ensure they don't make a left when they should be going right. While I drive the overall process, I always remember that "just cause it wasn't done exactly how I would do it doesn't mean it wasn't done right."

FIRST OFF, TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND REMEMBER, CRUSHING THOSE OKRS IS GOING TO TAKE TIME AND EFFORT. NEXT, SET CLEAR GOALS FOR EACH MILESTONE AND BUILD A PLAN AROUND IT. JUST LIKE YOU WOULD WHEN DEFINING A PROJECT, IDENTIFY SUCCESS METRICS FOR YOURSELF AND CREATE A PLAN. HERE’S AN EXAMPLE: First 30 days: Learning and Absorbing * Establish good working relationships with stakeholders: the key to being effective is having open lines of communication with your coworkers. Take the time to get to know them and learn from their experience. * Immerse yourself in data: learn where to find pertinent information, which dashboard to follow and how to query data on your own (or work with a data scientist). * Familiarize yourself with your product’s users, their needs, pain points and Jobs to be Done (JTBD). * Spend time doing competitive analysis to better understand the product landscape. * Integrate into the team’s current work and process and identify ways in which you could be helpful. 30-60: Ownership and Leadership * Assume responsibility for a project: work with your team to define the project’s scope and add requirements. * Define success metrics for the project and work with your engineers and data scientists to ensure impact can be measured and tracked. * Identify cross-functional dependencies and reach out to relevant teams. * Give a demo and solicit early feedback. Continue to do so throughout the project. * Report on the project’s progress and impact to keep everyone involved and interested. Speak clearly about the business impact and how the project ladders up to the company’s goals. 60-90: Strategy and Vision * Leverage your understanding of the business and its users to craft a vision and strategy. * Translate the above into an actionable roadmap and work with your team to define success metrics for each. * Run brainstorming sessions with your team regularly to generate ideas and prioritize them. * Evangelize: this is where your storytelling skills will come into play—make your team’s mission known, its projects familiar and its rationale clear to everyone. Write posts, speak at company meetings and bring feedback back to your team. * Become an expert: be the go-to person for your focus area.

At the company level, there are a few different methods of communications to keep everyone abreast of updates: 1. Product Notification emails (Ad Hoc) - These emails have a set template and allow product teams from around the company to share updates to their areas in a digestable format as major features go out of the door. 2. Product Newsletter emails (Weekly) - The weekly newsletter summarized major product updates and initiatives to all product team members. 3. Quartery Business Review meetings (Quarterly) - These larger meetings gather key parts of the business to talk through major updates each quarter, including an opportunity for the C-Suite to interact with and pose questions to respective teams. 4. Quarterly Kick-off meetings (Quarterly) - These meetings are specific to our Product Area and include our stakeholders; each team in Fintech is able to share wins from the prior quarter and plans for the coming quarter. 5. Slack Updates (Ad Hoc) - For major releases, the PM will often post a message in our global product channels to notify the broader group of the change. This allows an opportunity for the team to be recognized, as well as others to be informed about the update. 

Great question. It's really hard to prioritize small, iterative product improvements against large new features/bets. In my experience you need both, as well as a few other aspects. The way we do it in my teams is to think of it as balancing investment levels between different buckets, and to dedicate capacity to each of these buckets. Otherwise it's a constant struggle. We've tried to describe it in this section of the Atlassian product discovery handbook talking about ideas, and that one about prioritization. A couple of different types of buckets: * Boulders, rocks and pebbles * Boulders: large investments with potentially big payoff but high uncertainty, too. E.g. one or multiple teams over one or multiple quarters. * Rocks: medium sized investments with fewer risks, but potential for delighting users. E.g. one team for a month. * Pebbles: Small, typically straightforward change. E.g. one person for a week. * Don't underestimate the impact of rocks and pebbles! In my experience users LOVE to see the app they use get better every time, that's a great way to create fans. * RUF: Reliability + Usability improvements + new Features. Think of the RUF framework as a pyramid: * At the base of the pyramid there's Reliability. Reliability is about building trust. Trust takes a long time to build, but can be destroyed very quickly — a single event of data loss or security breach can be a serious source of churn, let alone repeat incidents. So you need to invest in your product's reliability first and foremost. * Usability Improvements comes second: a feature is rarely “done” — it’s part of a system and that system needs constant tuning. In your roadmap, it is important to allocate budget and resources to keep investing in improving your current feature set. * At the top of the pyramid is new features, both large and small. Then you decide how you want to invest in each: E.g. for a super early stage app you might be spending all your time on boulders and rocks, and little in reliability or usability improvements. For a more mature product you might spend 50% in the reliability bucket and only 10-20% on new features. Then how you actually implement that in your team can vary. In my teams we look at it at investment over time: we might be focusing on a boulder for a quarter, then go back and tackle a few rocks and pebbles. Some of the teams have a rotation where 1 engineer is focusing on pebbles each week. etc. But the important part is to have a strategy and make it a conscious choice, vs something that you react to every time you get a new request from a customer or stakeholder.

Product School, Try Exponent, and Product Allinace are good resources for PM interviews prep. Later is a good question. Interesting idea. I don't know of any, but it so interesting that someone should be offering it. Perhaps they might have rolled into certification or cohort courses with live projects!

A product roadmap is a tool that communicates strategy, goals, metrics, features, initiatives, and timelines to the organization. It is key to achieving alignment and buy-in from leadership and ensuring that teams are on the same page. Regular communication with stakeholders, especially when changes occur, is essential. Below are some key stakeholders and their expectations from a roadmap. * Sales and customer success need to understand feature timelines and the value they add to customers * Marketing needs to understand the initiatives, features, and value to different segments to prepare a go-to-market strategy * Engineering needs to understand the overall vision, outcomes as well as feature details and complexity for execution * Customer support needs to know about enhancements and timelines to keep customers happy Note that depending on the organization, Finance, Legal, Operations and others may also need to be in the loop on the roadmap. By getting a complete picture of stakeholders in your company and understanding each team's needs and communicating effectively, PMs can drive product success and meet customer needs.

I have sometimes seen Product teams focus on impact instead of landed impact. And while there is a lot of nuance in that answer I think landed impact is often the most overlooked KPI or OKR or goal (however you like to call them). Teams will goal on number of users or shipping a feature rather than goal on the impact enabled by those metric. Take your typical B2B SaaS for instance. 200 active users of a feature on day 1 is an ok measure of success. But what really matters is what those 200 active users have achieved with your product. Or what those 200 active users have led to in terms of business impact. The visual below is a good illustration of what I mean: https://www.useronboard.com/imgs/posts/mario-water.png

If you know that customers are not willing to adopt your solution, that's a bad spot to be in. 1. Re-evaluate what led you to the decision to build & when to do it. Was there a gap in your methodology, or a piece of research that led you down this path? How can you avoid this for the next piece of strategy planning? 2. Don't hope for better adoption -- test and prove this out. Can you get a high quality signal that customers will adopt, e.g. customers will pay you now for access to it? 3. Is there a wider org that will bear the cost of holding this solution, and values it for reasons other than direct revenue?