What are some skills a PM needs to move up the ladder to a Director level role? What are the criteria of evaluation?

Question

Alexa Maturana-Lowe · Accepted Answer

Every company is different but I can tell you what I've been working on as a part of my transition:

* Impact - as a part of my transition, as an individual contributor I chose to take on high profile company wide initiatives that helped me to show that I could make a huge impact for Fivetran as a business in addition to evolving the product experience and functionality. This forced me to understand what matters to the business more and how product changes impact business outcomes and helped me to get a seat at the table for company wide strategic changes.
 * Communication - being a strong communicator in lots of different forums was a huge area of focus for me. I had to get comfortable building relationships with and presenting to our C-suite, presenting to our company & sales organization regularly, communicating through slides and written documents. The biggest strength that I have in communication is conveying complex concepts in a synthesized way and I've found that this is essential as you move up within an organization and work with executives more often. I've really had to focus on developing relationships and being more flexible in my approach because I'm a very direct communicator and building relationships requires evolving that approach to be effective with all different communication styles.
 * Team Management - the biggest difference between being an individual contributor and a Manager or Director is instead of driving forward innovation directly in partnership with Engineering and Design, you're helping and empowering your team to do that innovation by coordinating resourcing, helping to guide high level strategy and providing coaching and accountability. This is an entirely different skillset and you have to be interested and motivated to make the switch away from the known into this known area. In my experience, I explicitly asked for these types of experiences and helped to drive my promotion because I was interested in growing in this way and I believe that management skills are a lifelong learning, not a check box.

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