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

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 Director. This is something I noticed for every Director I promoted, and I tell them this: there is almost always a big gap and crisis to overcome in the first year, because of the way people see you. Be ready for this.

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 leaders within the company, send emails with accomplishment, etc. so they can start seeing the impact you are doing. So that when they are asked if you are a good candidate for being a Director, they would say "of course, this person is awesome!".

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, you hear this little music telling you "it's time". And when you hear it, just look for other opportunities.

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 and what does not work.

Being a PM the only power you have comes from influence, you don't have authority on any of your peers. So the biggest frustration is when you don't manage to influence people in the right direction, and cannot use any authority to change this: developers not executing in the right direction, marketing promoting the product not aligned, etc.

The job of PM relies on influence, not on ideas. As a young PM, I always suggest to focus on building influence small steps by small steps. Get small wins. So as a PM start by achieving things, pick one thing and get it done in a short amount of time. And repeat it. This will tremendously help you in gaining influence.

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: the impact from the products I am overseeing, and the impact from products coming from PMs I had the chance to coach over time.

The job of PM relies on influence, not on ideas. As a young PM, I always suggest to focus on building influence small steps by small steps. Get small wins. People start to follow you because they see that you can achieve things, not because of your ideas. So as a PM start by achieving things, pick one thing and get it done in a short amount of time. And repeat it.