AMA: GitHub Senior Director of Product Management, Julian Dunn on Developing Your Product Management Career

I've definitely been there! As you correctly intuit, your first order of business is to buy yourself some time to develop a strategic point of view and a roadmap that supports that it. Obviously that means you're going to need to spend time meeting with customers, prospects and customer-facing teams inside your organization, synthesize the learnings, and develop that roadmap & strategy. In a startup, you have to do this at a much higher tempo than at a more established company, but it's esse ...Read More

There are a couple of factors to consider here: Are you learning anything new in your current role? If not, would staying with the company, even if it is in a different role, or a more senior role (be that IC or management), satisfy your learning? Do you enjoy the domain, vertical, and business model of the company that you work for? What are the company's growth prospects (or if a startup, prospect for success -- however you define success?) Be very honest and don't just take company management ...Read More

This is a tough question to answer because it is so situational. For example - I have seen organizations where PM is so immature that it is essentially a project management function. Melissa Perri even uses such an example in her excellent book Escaping the Build Trap! While in Perri's fictional organization, she was able to develop the PMPs into PMs in the end, many companies would opt to try and hire a few true PMs first. Another dimension is mix of seniority which is critical on any team (jus ...Read More

It can definitely be a steep learning curve, because at Staff+ PM level you are expected to have strengths in one or more areas of product management that aren't often exercised at lower levels. Some examples: Having a much wider aperture and being able to develop and sell portfolio-level (not just product or feature-level) product strategy that can touch other areas of the company Assessing and making build vs. borrow vs. buy recommendations & understanding how to work with a channel/partne ...Read More

My answer to this depends a lot on whether the "director" title includes people management or not. Personally, I believe that it should, and that the IC (individual contributor) track should only use the titles PM 1-3, Senior PM, Staff PM, Principal PM, Distinguished PM, etc. But I don't make the rules for the industry :-) and I recognize a lot of organizations use "director" to mean IC as well. I am going to answer the question assuming you mean that it includes people management. Accordingly, ...Read More

A few of things: Know what, when and how to delegate. Delegation has such a negative connotation in industry (being seen as letting garbage flow downhill) but I believe this is because so many managers are poor at the mechanics of delegation. As a PM director, you have to learn how to delegate problems to be solved and not orders to be fulfilled (a/k/a solutions) and be comfortable with the ultimate solutions even if they weren't what you would have built as an IC in the shoes of the delegate. Y ...Read More