AMA: Salesforce Director of Product Management, Anton Kravchenko on Developing Your Product Management Career

Typically, promotions are the result of an individual's performance and business needs. In other words, it's hard to make a case for becoming a Director if your area can be covered by a single Sr PM, so both you and your product area need to grow.  PM Directors are also people managers who hire ...more

Let me break it down by covering 3 different levels of PMs: 1. Associate PM -- the bar here is that you have great critical thinking, clear communication, energy, and a mix of CS and business degree.  2. Senior PM -- in addition to the above, you must have a track record of previously ...more

To make this decision, I think of opportunity, ambitions, passion, and time: 1. Opportunity - obviously there is a matter of compensation, but there is also an opportunity for professional growth. For example, joining a startup allows you to grow much quicker -- you will be wearing diff...more

My biggest frustration is that I let people down. Currently, I work with teams of 50+ people, which means I need to be available all the time. The more senior as a PM you become the more folks you need to work with. Time becomes the most valuable thing and I'm still learning how to manage it effe...more

Different folks would enjoy different things e.g. if you are an introvert -- the IC track might be more suitable as you will be spending a good chunk of your time creating docs, prototypes, etc. It's fun -- just a different kind of fun. If your personality craves people interactions, the people l...more

There are different paths that each product manager takes, but the common ones I've seen are: 1. Joining a tech company as an Associate PM or an intern straight from college. For college grads, I suggest starting by connecting with other product managers (e.g. via LinkedIn) to better understand...more

Leveling up to Dr level meant being a point of contact for many people at the company, which meant more inquiries from sales, customers, leadership, and other product teams. Since I got promoted, my inbox and # of slack messages doubled :)  My learning from this experience is that you want to do...more

My favorite interview question was asked by a hiring manager ~8 years ago when I interviewed for an Associate PM position at MuleSoft. I was asked the following: "Imagine humans decided to take the moon and put it through a giant chopper/grinder. The mass that comes out of the chopper is being d...more

To make the decision, I think of opportunity, ambitions, passion, and time: 1. Opportunity - obviously there is a matter of compensation, but there is also an opportunity for professional growth. For example, joining a startup allows you to grow much quicker -- you will be wearing diffe...more

There are different paths that each product manager takes, but the common ones I've seen are: 1. Joining a tech company as an Associate PM or an intern straight from college. For college grads, I suggest starting by connecting with other product managers (e.g. via LinkedIn) to better understand...more

If you enjoy Product, a typical path is either to become a people manager, remain IC, or quit to start your own thing. In big companies like Salesforce, there are plenty of Director level individual contributors (ICs), so if you don't want to manage other PMs, you are better off in a bigger compa...more

It's less about metrics and more about the outcomes you are creating for the business. For example, you might bring 10,000 new users or improve a UX for a specific feature -- but what matters at the end of the day is how you impacted the business. Has any of that made the business grow faster or ...more

There are different ways you can think about it, but I like to think about PMs as those that build new products (0-->1) and PMs that come in to manage an existing product (1-->N). * 0-->1: Product Managers who build a new product or service from scratch often need to innovate, which means bu...more