What are the steps to consider while transitioning from PO to stellar PM?

This is a question that is close to my heart and I love to see folks transition from Product Owners to Stellar PMs. Taking a step back, I truly love to see people become the best versions of themselves and it doesn't matter if they are Product Owners, Product Managers, Program Managers or any & every role they like to see themselves in! 

The key to excel in any of these roles is to understand that every role has a few basic requirements but once they are met, there is the opportunity to bring a lot of creativity, one's unique interests and leverage the strengths that you bring to the table.

For a Product Manager, there are about four key skill or competency buckets that matter:

1) Product Strategy 

2) Product Execution

3) Influencing People

4) Customer/ Market Insights 

The best product managers (the so-called mythical unicorns or the 1% PMs or the PM influencers) are supposedly the best at all of these competencies. The secret here is that no one needs to be best at any of these competencies all the time. Its enough to meet the basic requirements for each of these competencies and excel at those that you are good at. Then, chose the PM role that helps you excel.

Lets map these competencies to broad PM types:

1) Platform PM - needs great execution, very good people skills & good insights 

2) Growth PM - needs excellent market insights & very good strategy 

3) UX PM - needs great insights, very good exectution & good strategy

4) New Products PM - needs great insights & startegy and good execution 

So, PMs need to excel at atleast one competenc and be good at one or two others.

The above attributes can also be mapped to the stage of a PMs career and their seniority & ability to infleunce a firm's strategy & vision

1) Early career PMs need to focus on Exeuction. The nuts & bolts of any operation and product are important for future success. Refer to the other Qs about Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, etc to understand the role of context in building killer products 

2) Mid-career PMs need to start thinking more about customers and developing people skills. At this stage, the ability to influence people, shape decisions and understand what customers want becomes more improtant. At the same time, there are folks who join Tech firms as mid-career PMs and its critical thay they spend a lot of time on understanding the nuts & bolts of the operation. This ability to do deep will help bring their other skills to the front

3) PM Leaders need to understand the Product strategy, the market landscape, the trends and then the customer needs & problems. If they have come up the traditional PM ladder in Tech firms, they would have developed the other skills that will help them success at this level. For folks that have'nt, the inability to dive deep, be speciifc or understand the details ususally derails careers! The average tenure of external Product VPs (& above) in start-ups & other late stage firms is less than 18-months for this reason!

This ended up being one of the longest answers and I feel that I am barely scratching the surface here! In addition to the above, Patience (esp with Oneself), the unwillingness to accept medoctity (which is ironically, opposite of being patient), the ability to take people along and the ability to synthesize complex problems into simple bite-size solutions is what sets stellar PMs apart! The more I spend time as a PM, the more I realise its an art but a Socratic method & scientific approach can help one get there!