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?

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 working on, look at other ways to drive a larger impact at the team or organizational level. Find opportunities to build bridges, mentor others, build inclusive communities, and impact the broader organization.

Also, be sure to have these conversations with your manager. Don’t wait for opportunities to fall into your lap. Express what your career goals are and what you’re interested in. Your manager will help you get there.

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: Take collective responsibility for growing the size and quality of our team
• Customer Centric: Deeply understand our customers’ pain points and build the best solutions to meet their needs
• Communication and Collaboration: Master cross-functional co-creation to deliver high-quality results.

If you are a senior PMs who hopes to advanced to Director and above, there are 3 additional questions I would dig into:

• How can I exhibit a boundaryless mindset? Senior PMs can scale impact beyond their specific project, program team, area, or pillar. They build bridges and influence across the company. This also leads to driving more complex and nuanced product initiatives.
• What do I want to be known for? As you grow in your product career, consider where you can develop depth of expertise. This could include a particular specialty (for example - enterprise adoption, fintech, consumer marketplaces). It could also include a particular skill (for example - crafting a long term vision, creating structure from ambiguity, understanding revenue impact).

Do I want to grow as an IC or a manager? There comes a time in everyone’s career when they face a key question: “How do I want to scale my impact?” As a PM, there are many ways to grow in impact.

• A senior individual contributor (IC) scales their impact through the work—being able to manage highly complex and critical projects across multiple teams, providing nuanced strategic leadership in making decisions, and building and innovating for our customers. They build deep subject matter expertise and are a role model for others.
• On the other hand, a manager scales their impact through their team—empowering others through coaching and providing the right opportunities for growth.
• Many employees switch between the manager and IC career paths. Both opportunities are equal in terms of seniority, prestige, and accountability. At Asana, we want to make sure people have the flexibility to work in the right capacity for themselves at different points in their lives.

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 tools and conditions for the whole org to get better at being PMs. Whew!

Given the changes in responsibilities, you’re likely going to have to evolve into performing at the Director level so you can set your” opportunity table” for a Director opportunity. Given where the Senior PM level usually sits, here are probably the kinds of skills and experiences you’ll need to try to acquire:

1. Learn how to manage and mentor people. Does your company hire interns? Manage one or more of them! Does your company hire new people that need mentors? Become a mentor! Manage people volunteering somewhere! There’s lots of ways to get skills and experience here, great books too (Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek I highly recommend.) But in general the best teacher for managing people is experience.
2. Learn how to build product strategies at the portfolio level. If you’ve gotten to the Senior PM level, you probably know how to develop a strategy for your product or feature. But doing this as a portfolio level is different. It requires thinking longer term about multiple teams with multiple strategies & roadmaps. The best way to learn this skill is to take on the responsibility of doing this or sharing it with your boss or higher-ups. This is a stretch to do in the beginning, but the more you do it the better you get at it. Some good practice is also crafting strategies for products you like or companies you admire. See how many of them come true and how right or wrong you were. Learn, rinse and repeat. I also recommend Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rummelt. Amazing book on this topic.
3. Help your fellow PMs in the org level up via skills like org design, policy design, tooling upgrades, etc. Basically practice the art of leveling up a team by creating an environment for PMs to level up and do great work. Think about your own experience doing your best work. What kinds of tools, policies and cultural norms were in place that really helped you level up? Now think of ways you can get from where you are today to that ideal. What tools do you need? What policies need to change? How does the culture need to change? From here, learn how to drive the highest priority items. You don’t need to be a Director for this, you can pursue it by speaking up in feedback forums on these topics, work with your peers or managers to make things happen, etc. If someone was taking initiative here, you can bet managers will be considering them for leadership spots.

That’s the high level summary! The opportunity actually presenting itself requires being at a company where there is a need for someone at that level, which requires a bit of luck and timing. So all places aren’t going to be best fits for you, and you should assess that on your own as well.

As for types of tracks, PM leadership skills are pretty transferrable. Director, Senior Director and VP are more traditional paths. But I’ve seen old bosses and colleagues go lots of different ways. Something I hear a lot is that the PM role prepares you for being a start-up CEO. Have certainly seen that happen! An old boss is CEO now. But I’ve also seen lots of people end up in Marketing, Design, Engineering, Strategy…there’s no one set path!

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 team is as PMs. The skillset to make others grow their potential and become their best is very different from how you get better yourself. 

Despite being a cliche, a coach vs players in the field metaphor works well here. So if you're looking to find out whether people management is for you, try to mentor a junior PM on your team, interns etc. and focus on making them successful. If you enjoy the challenge, management might be a good track. I also have a tremendous respect for PMs who are self-aware enough to know that they do not enjoy management, and prefer to focus on an advanced individual career track. Those folks end up deepening their expertise in a domain area to become product "architects", product strategists, internal consultants etc. There many opportunities for very senior IC folks, and if you get most joy out of being an expert that helps others through sharing knowledge, that might be a preferred route for you. 

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 longer have to be both great managers and the most knowledgeable product experts in the room.

However, if you do pursue the management track, once you are at director or above, you are expected to be a business leader first and a product leader second. That is, you need to understand how to define business (not just product) KPIs and run your business according to them, which also means that not every business problem is going to be solved by building more product. You will need to have at least a basic facility in other functions that touch PM, such as marketing (specifically, product marketing), sales, customer success and finance; not enough to be an expert in these functions, of course, but enough to have empathy for those experts, speak their language and have an opinion about those areas.