How do product management skills change as you get more senior in the role?

When you're first starting out in product, you're building your product tool belt and the focus is on execution, customer empathy, technical depth and collaboration to drive a (measurable) outcome. As you become more senior, being able to drive a strategy based on a deep understanding of users, the market and being able to effectively prioritize to drive the biggest business outcomes becomes critical. Being able to align with cross-functional stakeholders and leadership is a huge focus. This requires really strong collaboration and communication skills as well as a deep understanding of the user and market. To become even more senior, you need to build leverage - this could be helping other PMs to help drive forward the strategy that you've help to set or empowering members of your engineering and design team to drive impact so you can deliver even more depending on if you want to move into management or stay an individual contributor.

Thank you for your question.  A lot of this comes down to the expectation of your organization for your role, but at a high level, product management roles can be seen to consist of three main areas of focus: strategic (e.g., determining how you will win in the market and the path to get there), operational (e.g., the processes and determination of how you will execute to meet current goals and achieve strategic plans), and tactical (e.g., doing discovery and writing requirements to build product). 

Generally junior roles (e.g., associate product manager) will consist primarily of more tactical, with a small focus on operational and strategic activities.  As you progress to more senior roles, (e.g., to principal product manager, director, and beyond) you will see the focus on tactical reducing, and expectations of more operational and strategic increase.

One of the biggest challenges I see in technically focused product managers who get into or seek more mid-level product management roles is the switch to becoming more strategic, where typically they also need to gain more commercial focus and understand the overall market and go-to-market requirements to see their product succeed.  At this level, stakeholder engagement and management start to become even more important. For example, when selling a product that is sold to external customers, it’s imperative to work with sales and partner teams, marketing, finance, and potentially other functions so that you can get buy in and engagement to see your product or feature successfully sold.

Getting into senior level product management roles switches focus even more, as then you’re looked to lead the product management organization, which may include taking on other functions (e.g., product marketing and user experience teams), setting the vision for your organization, driving and developing your team to ensure they can achieve that vision, and more.

What I’ve presented above are generalities, but it’s important to note that different organizations can have wildly different expectations of product management.  You can see that in the many different job descriptions and expectations for a role you may be applying for, or that you may find yourself in.  It’s important therefore to understand the expectations of the role you are in or are seeking to get into, and work with your manager (or undertake in your own time) to identify and follow through on opportunities for development to strengthen areas that need more focus.  In that sense, seeking a mentor inside or outside of your organization, or even joining a community, can really help get a broader perspective and get input from more who have gone through a journey like your own.