AMA: Chainguard Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Product Management Career Path

PM I/II/III is primarily about execution. Someone else comes up with an idea/initiative and a PM at this level largely takes direction, writes briefs/PRDs assuming that the business case is a go, since their manager told them to do it. Because these initiatives are rarely risky big digs, most of the debate is about scope, implementation details and sequencing (should we do this now or later, or should the v1 have feature X in it versus the v2). To get to Senior PM, I need to see that PMs aren't ...Read More

Being a manager of PMs is a completely different job, with substantially different performance indicators than being an IC PM. For example, there is no way I can be the deepest expert in all areas of the product or customer personas; my utility on these matters is limited to sniffing out what I suspect might be the ground truth on something and helping folks to optimize their research/understanding along the lines of that suspicion. If I am effectively doing my job as a director of PM, there sho ...Read More

Hopefully you have a senior/executive management team that believes in data-informed decision making. Data, by the way, is not just quantitative data (e.g. # of customers asking and their ARR) but qualitative counts for a lot, too, especially in B2B. If you don't have such a team, then this is job one, otherwise it doesn't matter what framework you have; prioritization decisions are going to be made by executive team opinion or pontification rather than examination of ideas through that framewor ...Read More

To pivot into product management from partnerships/bizdev, you first want to think about performing a role in partnerships that requires you to work closely with product management, and then determine what the title is. There are three main focus areas for partnerships that I commonly see: SI (system integrators/implementation partners); channel (resellers/marketplaces); and technology partners. As you can probably imagine, the latter is where you will have the most touch points with product, so ...Read More

Congratulations -- you are already a PM, so you're starting from a position of strength. Regardless of whether you are an internal PM, platform PM, B2B PM, B2C PM, etc. there are always common PM skills across these areas, so think about what is transferable and what is not, and emphasize those. For example, if I am hiring for a customer-facing PM role and I have an internal PM candidate in front of me who is trying to make the case that they are the best candidate for that, I have to be convinc ...Read More

After the many rounds of layoffs in both big and small tech over the last few years, PMs are being asked to become more well-rounded business leaders -- not just be the interface to engineering. This isn't a question of "doing more with less" (I really hate that expression) but about doing the work that uniquely creates the most leverage for the organization. It's not sufficient to know how to write PRDs or user stories anymore; you have to understand how to run your product or domain as a busin ...Read More