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

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 document as much of the process as possible so people outside of your team can find SMEs and relevant information for your area.

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 and build a team of other Product Managers. Having good people skills is important but you also need to be a great PM, so you can lead and help your team of Product Managers grow. Finally, shifting to be a Director shifts your time allocation -- you spend more time in meetings working with your team and less time creating content, PRDs, etc. 

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 different hats and working much closer to the company leadership. You will make a lot of mistakes, but the learnings will be much greater. 2. Ambitions - depending on where you at in life, different things might take a priority and it's important to keep that in mind e.g. you are starting a family or want to work remote from an island in Hawaii. If you are ambitious and feel that you can do more, you can tell your manager you want more work or go to another company or start a project/your own company. 3. Passion - you can gain your initial experience in one company, but if your heart is in the other place e.g. music, you probably want to consider getting a job at Spotify or Apple Music. That is where you will have the most fun. 4. Time - from my experience, it takes ~2 years to get up to speed with a new product area and make significant contributions. That is why it's common to see PMs going to other companies or seeking other roles within the same company. This allows you to grow and shift gears a little. In my 5 years at MuleSoft for example, I worked on 3 different product areas -- I've learned how to build marketplaces, identity products, and API platforms.

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 building something that no one else has built before. * 1-->N: Joining a company to own an existing product, also means that product-market fit has been already established. As a PM you will focus on scaling to new or more users. I'm planning to release a new video on this topic in a few weeks, so stay tuned. Here is a link to the channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAz_arwNkiPobhi09VrMFg

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 what we do. There are great books available on this topic as well -- "Cracking PM Interview" is among my favorites. I also created a series of videos explaining tech jobs and what do I do in more detail - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAz_arwNkiPobhi09VrMFg 2. Transition from other roles e.g. Engineering, Professional Services, Support. This path is easier, as it assumes that you are already in a tech company and can make connections with internal PMs. Picking a PM as a mentor or just becoming a friend with one is a great place to start. I also need to point out that PMs sit at the intersection of Business, Technology, and UX (Customer) -- that is why engineers who transition to a PM team will have an advantage as they understand the technology much deeper. On the other hand, someone in Support who wants to become a PM brings a much deeper understanding of a customer.

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 released products and features. The experience here is what matters as you learn how to avoid mistakes. You also know what Product Management is all about e.g. market, users, technology, etc. As a Sr PM, you don't need to be told what to do and how to do it. You are expected to tell your manager about the work you have done to come to a strategy you are proposing. 3. Director PM -- you need to be an inspiring leader with great people skills. Your work shifts more into setting the vision and strategy and helping your team stay on course. You will work with product leadership e.g. VPs, CPOs defending the strategy and updating everyone on where your product is at while helping your team grow.

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 leader track might be more appropriate. Being a good people manager is hard, you need to lead by example and support your team whenever they need you. You also need to be comfortable with confronting people by giving them radical candor. Staying "nice job" to something that you think is a "bad job", is not an option. You need to help people grow and it's harder than it seems.

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 made it more resilient among competitors? Depending on the company size and what you do, some outcomes might be more obvious than others -- for example, there was a time when I worked as a PM for a relatively small product, which generated direct revenue to the business. When the product made the first $1M, everyone wanted to talk to me including the CEO. On the other hand, you have internal products that might not directly translate to revenue. It's important to provide this visibility and translate how your product affects the business e.g. more users, less cost, faster feature delivery, etc. Suggest you check some of the videos I recorded here as they cover this topic partially - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAz_arwNkiPobhi09VrMFg

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 company where you can focus on one specific product. 

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 what we do. There are great books available on this topic as well -- "Cracking PM Interview" is among my favorites. I also created a series of videos explaining tech jobs and what do I do in more detail - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAz_arwNkiPobhi09VrMFg 2. Transition from other roles e.g. Engineering, Professional Services, Support. This path is easier, as it assumes that you are already in a tech company and can make connections with internal PMs. Picking a PM as a mentor or just becoming a friend with one is a great place to start. I also need to point out that PMs sit at the intersection of Business, Technology, and UX (Customer) -- that is why engineers who transition to a PM team will have an advantage as they understand the technology much deeper. On the other hand, someone in Support who wants to become a PM brings a much deeper understanding of a customer.

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 different hats and working much closer to the company leadership. You will make a lot of mistakes, but the learnings will be much greater. 2. Ambitions - depending on where you at in life, different things might take a priority and it's important to keep that in mind e.g. you are starting a family or want to work remote from an island in Hawaii. If you are ambitious and feel that you can do more, you can tell your manager you want more work or go to another company or start a project/your own company. 3. Passion - you can gain your initial experience in one company, but if your heart is in the other place e.g. music, you probably want to consider getting a job at Spotify or Apple Music. That is where you will have the most fun. 4. Time - from my experience, it takes ~2 years to get up to speed with a new product area and make significant contributions. That is why it's common to see PMs going to other companies or seeking other roles within the same company. This allows you to grow and shift gears a little. In my 5 years at MuleSoft for example, I worked on 3 different product areas -- I've learned how to build marketplaces, identity products, and API platforms.

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 dumped on the surface of the earth. The question was - do you need an oxygen mask to climb on the top of this mass" This is a quantitative question that is typically asked in the PM interviews, but more fun to think about :) The right answer is to show your logical thinking e.g. your approach, unknowns, corner cases, etc.

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 effectively.