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

In my opinion, it's best to land a customer-facing role (support, customer success, expert services, pre-sales/sales, etc.) and then try to make a lateral move into PM, at the same company if possible. That's because customer empathy -- or even more important than that, unique customer insights and a point of view about the customer and the market -- are the most critical skills I look for as a foundation for whether someone new to PM is likely going to succeed. While it's not impossible to star ...Read More

I'm heartened to see that as product management has matured as a discipline, the IC track has begun to carry as much weight as the management track. Engineering figured this out earlier than PM did, by having staff/principal/distinguished IC levels, and PM is finally adopting such levels. What this frees ICs to do (who want to remain ICs rather than people managers) is to gain larger and larger scope, coupled with deep domain knowledge, to reach these levels -- and means that managers of PMs no ...Read More

The answer to this is going to be different for each person, because it depends on so much on the intersection of your own values and what you're trying to achieve in life. Personally, I look at these factors: The domain of the company and the domain I'd be working in at that company. Could I stand to work in that domain for 3-5 years or even longer, taking into account the market dynamics of that sector? It's why I don't want to work in health care or FinTech, but obviously, many other folks ha ...Read More

Just like there are a million ways to segment the market, there are also a million ways to segment PMs. :-) Here are a couple of ways I like to think about PM segmentation: B2B versus B2C. This is probably the most obvious. In B2B, there is a smaller pool of customers, so you truly get to know them and build long-term relationships with individuals at those customers. The drawback is that you're always fighting against the "whales" (folks paying you a lot of money) skewing your roadmap in their ...Read More

I think I intuitively knew this, but the amount of time one ends up spending on trying to improve communication between different individuals and teams in the organization increases dramatically as you become a more senior leader. Much of this work happens behind the scenes and is hidden from ICs. It can involve anything from the coaching that you do with your team to improve their communication to the cajoling (and yes, sometimes threatening) that you need to conduct with other functions like e ...Read More