AMA: GitLab VP, Product, Mike Flouton on Product Management Career Path

You should be thinking of your product management career as a story and be thinking about what the headlines and chapter headings for each one of those stories is. What are the sound bites of the things that you accomplish in each chapter of your career journey? Those should be big and progressively getting bigger as you get more senior. For example Tripled SaaS revenue over two years from 25MM to 75MM. Grew the size of the product management organization from 5 to 15. Won Gartner MQ 3 years run ...Read More

Well, hopefully you've created some kind of impact. It may be that it's not obvious what that impact was, but hopefully the company, the product, and the market has done something in your tenure at this organization. Even if you've just executed off of a specific task list of features, hopefully some of them added some value to your community, to your users, and to the outcome of the business. And in that case, I'd highlight what happened to the product while you were there. Did you grow? Did yo ...Read More

Well, as always, it depends. I'd say first you have to diagnose the situation and understand the root causes. Why are they bringing you tasks rather than responsibilities? Why are they asking you to do tactical, very specific things as opposed to delivering outcomes? It could be that you just have a really inexperienced manager and executive team making these asks, in which case you probably need to decide whether you want to invest your time managing up and trying to get them to uplevel their a ...Read More

You want a healthy balance of the two, and it's really going to depend on the stage of the organization and what you want to accomplish. It may be that you're trying to effect a cultural change and drive a different way of thinking, in which case optimizing for bringing in outside talent can be helpful, particularly as you're bringing in senior outside talent. The challenge with that, though, is that it can signal, rightly or wrongly, that there isn't upward mobility organically within the organ ...Read More

This is an interesting question. I would ask, if you're not interested in leading a product management organization, what is it about product management that has you more interested in doing it as an individual contributor? My experience is that as you get more senior, move into more senior executive positions, more and more of your time is on people management and departmental and organizational strategy. That's going to be true in any executive job that you shoot for - it's not unique to CPO. ...Read More

So it starts with foundational product management knowledge. Typically those folks who get promoted to Director are the top product managers in the company. That's basically just a necessary but not sufficient condition. You need to be an excellent individual contributor PM in order to mentor and develop your team as a director. Second, to make the jump to director, you need to have shown your ability to think about business outcomes and deliver results. This should be true for every PM, but I t ...Read More

I don't think you'll like this answer, but I'm just going to tell it like I see it. I'm not sure it's a good use of time trying to overcome domain hiring preference in general (note - I'm intentionally not using "bias" here because I think it's the wrong word). My personal feeling is I'd rather have a great product manager than a domain expert almost any day of the week. It's easier for people to learn a domain than it is to learn to be a great product manager. But pragmatically, I realize not e ...Read More

I do mentor and coach a number of folks from different backgrounds and at different stages of their career. I typically prefer to mentor folks who are product managers versus folks who may be aspiring to do something or to not really have kind of a clear path forward in life. There are mentors and coaches who are appropriate for those folks as well. I just really enjoy helping people break through their limitations as a product manager, learn how to play organizational politics, for lack of a be ...Read More

First off, I'd check the entry point. I think it's rare that somebody would be new to product management and be coming in as a middle manager. Typically, people without a product management background are either going to be coming in at an entry level or occasionally as an executive who might be running a department on an interim basis, but those typically aren't permanent. So that said, I've seen people come in successfully from a few different functions. Some of those include sales engineering ...Read More