AMA: Adobe Senior Director of Product Management, 3D Category, Nicolas Liatti on Product Management Career Path

The way how you measure your own success depends on the criteria you have for yourself. However, I think it's very important to know that when you go into the PM career that there are some specificities: this is a late reward career. Being a PM is not like an engineer or a designer or a sales where you produce outputs. The way how you measure success for a PM over time usually take years, to measure impacts that you brought with products. For myself I use 2 indicators to measure my own success: ...Read More

I like 2 use 2 things to evaluate a job: I should either learn a lot, or earn a lot (or ideally both!). We try to always favor learning, but sometimes your familial situation makes that earning may become the main criteria at some moment in your life. Overall, your career is not the most important, your life is. Nothing beats feeling good in your life, and this is what you should look for. I don't think there is any way to measure when it's time to leave, but usually you know it. Deep in you, yo ...Read More

I thought that execution only would allow me to continue to grow, that my actions would speak for themselves. This is true up to group product manager / principal level, but to become Director you need to work on the optics as well, how people perceive you. In many companies you need Senior Director/VP recommendations from other orgs to become a Director, and how can they do it if they never heard of you...? If you want to become a Director, I really encourage you to start reaching out to leader ...Read More

I tried to always approach my career with 2 axis: you should either learn a lot, or earn a lot. If you don't have any, then look for another job. If you don't see growth opportunity but still has way to learn a lot, I think it's worth staying. In the case of conflicts with your manager, you can also learn what is NOT working, and what you will try not to do in your future jobs. It happened to me where I stayed for 2 years with a manager I was in conflict with, but I learnt a lot about what works ...Read More

When you become a Director you usually become an executive at the same time. The biggest change that happens is the way how people look at you: everything you say is interpreted in a different way when you are a Director. This means you really need to change how you communicate and manage people, even if your scope didn't change much. This means that expectations from people are way bigger, and this usually comes with a big disillusion / crisis in the first few months after being promoted Direct ...Read More