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

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 and customer success management. I think the key here is that you develop strong customer empathy, customer interview, and customer relationship management skills. And if you're making a lateral transfer within a company, you've acquired strong domain about the product, the market, and the buyers. So typically, that's the most common entry point, although folks will often also come in through engineering for a similar set of reasons, though that doesn't help you as a non-IT professional.

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 think we all know some PMs who are more focused on activities, processes, inward-facing concerns, and who would prefer to spend time with engineers rath than with customers. And there is a place for that skill set and those folks, but typically they aren't the ones who get promoted to Director. Directors are the ones who are seeing the bigger picture, who are cutting through administrativa and nonsense and doing things that actually drive results, as measured in dollars and bottom-line business outcomes. Third, you need to show an affinity to manage people. Once you cross over into people management, that becomes the most important part of your job. Sure, you need to manage up, set strategy, evangelize the product, etc. But building a world class team and making them successful is job one. I've seen too many rockstar PMs fail to make the leap to Director because they can't get themselves out of the weeds and they disempower their teams.

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 running * Eliminated $12MM in opex, leading to GM improvement from 8% to 12% and putting us over the rule of 40 Thinking about those metrics and planning them out will allow you to tell a story throughout your career that shows increasingly bigger outcomes being driven on bigger scales. I can tell you that when folks call me for executive jobs, what they are typically asking, and I think this applies for any people management job and product, the scope of responsibility that you had. And typically that's measured by number of reports in your organization and the rough amount of revenue that you drive. That's what folks care about for directors, senior directors, VPs, and CPOs. So the sooner you can start to be thinking about, okay, how are those headlines going to reflect my ability to increase the size of the revenue we're doing, the market we're capturing, and the business outcomes delivering, the better.

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 asks of you or to move on and find a more supportive, better environment. It may also be that you do have an appropriate management infrastructure, but you haven't earned their trust or given them a reason to believe that you can operate on more ambiguous terms and do higher leverage activity. So I'd have a heart-to-heart, frank conversation with your manager and try to understand what it is. Why are they asking you to do discrete tasks as opposed to giving you higher level objectives and outcomes to drive? And then based on your answer, take it from there. If you don't have the type of relationship with your manager, where you can ask a question like this and get a thoughtful answer, that might be a clue as to some of the dynamics leading to this type of engagement.

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 organization, which can be disempowering and lead to retention challenges, not to mention every time you bring somebody new, they're hitting the ground and ramping up from scratch. So you want a balanced approach where you're promoting from within and bringing in new talent, and depending on the state of the organization, your place in the market, the quality of the product managers, and culture that you have in place, you may optimize for one side or the other, but there's no one size fits all answer.

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. You'll be spending a lot of amount of your time people management and strategizing. So I'm kind of not sure why you'd be looking for a different executive role if you do enjoy the product management work. That said, if I had to pick one executive role, I'd pick Chief Customer Officer. I think a lot of the listening, customer relationship and customer empathy that you develop over your career as a PM will transfer directly over to a chief customer officer role. It will be different though. It's more of a sales role than a product role, which is more of a one to many, highly leveraged function. So it will be different. All that to say, the job that obviously you're most prepared for by your experience as a PM is a CPO. That's probably what you should be aiming for. I'm not sure I'd recommend continuing in product management if you aspire to a different executive job. Chief Customer Officer would be closest, but you're probably better off changing now and climbing the CSM leadership ranks directly.

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 everybody shares that opinion. There are examples of products in highly detailed, highly technical domains where the talent pool is rich enough where it's entirely feasible and reasonable to expect to hire a domain expert. I really just pragmatically don't see a lot you can do as a candidate to change somebody's perception on that matter. It's very difficult to get a hiring manager's attention. Typically these days, folks are getting hundreds or thousands of resumes for open positions. And recruiters are looking for a very specific set of fields. Sure, there's the cliche advice on LinkedIn to find the hiring manager and network and reach out to them. I can tell you at GitLab, that doesn't work. We're very intentional about our hiring process. We do not allow hiring managers to interfere with the process because we don't want to introduce bias. There may be some organizations where there is some advantage to be gained in doing that. But frankly, I'd always rather optimize for the best possible candidate. So I realize that's probably not a great answer to your question. I would say just don't spend time worrying about domain hiring preference. You can still apply for jobs if you don't have the quite right domain and hope to catch their eye. But I would probably not guess that you're going to have a lot of success changing somebody's mind on whether they need a domain expert or not for a position.

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 better word. Learn how to do the things that matter and set themselves up to get promoted and climb the ladder. Strictly just because I think that's where I can add more value. In terms of the best way to approach a prospective mentor, I'd say come with a well thought out ask. Understand what you want to get out of the mentorship and show that you're willing to do some work. These relationships work best when the mentee puts in the work. People just looking to show up and have someone tell them what to do everyone once in a while don't go far. Demonstrate you'll do the work by doing it before you approach a potential mentor.

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 you raise money? Did you achieve an outcome? Was there revenue growth? Point to those things, and people will connect the dots that hopefully your work had something to do with it. That said, it's always much more ideal to have a very direct link between the stuff that you've done and the outcomes you've driven, which is why I just tell PMs to be laser focused on actual outcomes, rather than checklists and processes. Actually focus on the substance of what you're doing, what you're accomplishing, and the results you're delivering. So best not to find yourself in a situation like this if possible, but if you do, yeah, just do your best and fall back on the broader accomplishments of the organization and try to do better in your next role.