What type of skill sets and experiences do I need to build in order to strengthen my career and move from being a Sr. Product Manager to Director level and above? What type of leadership career tracks do you see people continue their careers?

The most concise way I've described the difference between being an IC and a manager to someone was: "As an individual contributor, you need to get sh*t done. As a manager, you need to make sh*t happen". I have covered the specific skills need for both senior PMs and Directors in another answer to this AMA, but the most important difference between a senior PM and a people manager PM is that the former needs to excel at being a good PM themselves, and the latter is evaluated on how good their te ...Read More

The transition from a Sr Product Manager role to a director level usually focuses on developing your strategic thinking, influencing others across the organization, and guiding larger portfolio decisions. In other words, you’ll need to grow from an execution-based mindset to that of one centered on longer-term vision, team leadership, and effective decision-making (at scale). In my experience, these are the key areas that one should focus on. Skill Sets to Develop: Strategic Vision & Storyte ...Read More

Great question! The move from Senior PM to Director level and above is a challenging one. In general, the change really involves the transition from product management to product leadership. You are typically going from managing one team at a high level with one roadmap and no direct reports to a role managing multiple teams at a high level with multiple roadmaps and direct reports AND driving an effective vision & strategy for your portfolio that brings those elements together AND provide t ...Read More

At Asana, we break down PM skills into 6 core competencies. Demonstrating growth in these competencies is critical for all PMs, including our senior folks. Growth Mindset: Be open and curious when building, growing, and leading Strategic: Create the best and boldest ideas with a boundaryless mindset, making decisions with the company mission in mind first, team second, and self third Get Stuff Done: Find the best solutions with the highest ROI to deliver value to our users fast Grow Team Asana: ...Read More

If you’re looking to grow from a Senior PM to a Group PM or Director, begin to look more broadly across the business vs focusing solely on your specific product area. It’s important to deeply understand the business levers that outcomes that the company is aiming to achieve. Once you start to understand the business at the level, you’ll be able to connect dots and identify opportunities to drive impact at a larger scale. If you don’t have the opportunity to shift the type of product you’re worki ...Read More

I'm heartened to see that as product management has matured as a discipline, the IC track has begun to carry as much weight as the management track. Engineering figured this out earlier than PM did, by having staff/principal/distinguished IC levels, and PM is finally adopting such levels. What this frees ICs to do (who want to remain ICs rather than people managers) is to gain larger and larger scope, coupled with deep domain knowledge, to reach these levels -- and means that managers of PMs no ...Read More

This can vary from organization to organization, so take the specific examples with a little bit of a grain of salt. However, the rough frame is how I might think about it broadly. The way that we think about our management track here at HubSpot is, you have your typical IC roles from APM to PM to SPM, and then from there, there's kind of a decision that you want to make to either jump into a management track or to continue down the IC path. If you're going down that management track, there's a ...Read More