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.

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:

1. Strategic Vision & Storytelling:
   Climbing up the ladder isn’t just about managing more product roadmaps; it’s about defining the strategy and market direction, gaining a deeper understanding of the business strategy and how it relates to long-term execution plans and anticipating future market needs. A key bit of being at a higher level of telling that story and connecting those dots for others. Be good at explaining what the strategy is and why it's the right path for your organization. If you can't bring people along the journey, you will never get their full support.

2. Stakeholder Management:
   The higher you go, the more internal and external stakeholder management you will have. In lower levels that's more at a feature level management, but at a Director level, it's more about strategy implications and trade-offs with your stakeholders.

3. Leadership & Talent Development:
   Typically at the Director level or above is managing a team of Product Managers. For me, I have been managing Product Mgrs for nearly a decade and find it one of the most rewarding parts of the role. Growing a team of strong product thinkers and empowering them to execute efficiently is a huge part of moving up that corporate ladder.

4. Process Process Process
   As you move up, you need to ensure your team has the tools and processes in place to support them. You are less in the weeds each day and thus have to ensure that you have enabled them with a framework to follow that will make them successful in their careers and drive your product forward.
   However, I despise process for the sake of process (a common issue at larger organizations). Be willing to challenge a process that isn't adding value and ensure that what you drive provides your team the room to grow. I like to think of it as guardrails for my team. I don't tell them specifically what to do and a playbook/process to follow letter by letter. I provide them with guidance and point them down the right path with some guardrails to ensure they don't make a left when they should be going right. While I drive the overall process, I always remember that "just cause it wasn't done exactly how I would do it doesn't mean it wasn't done right."

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 couple of key things that we want to see before you move into management roles. So we have kind of a glide path from SPM into those manager roles. Right after SPM, we have a Product Lead role that is kind of player/coach where you still own IC scope in one area, but manage in another. Then that moves into a GPM role up into Director, and then beyond that senior director, VP, etc. One of the reasons why we have that glide-path is there are couple of key things that we want SPMs to start showing as they move up into that management track.

1. People Leadership & Team Development: One of the first things is on the people management and people leadership side of things where when you go from being an IC to managing people, there are a lot of things that you need to do that are completely new to that role and new to things that you don't actually learn as a PM. And so one of the skills that we want to see early on from like an SPM perspective are SPMs that are coaching and mentoring other PMs to learn new skills, to become better product managers, and helping them work through tough interpersonal problems and stuff like that. So I think that's like probably the number one area is like in that kind of people leadership and team development side of things is leaning into, you know, in the early days mentorship and coaching and things like that.

2. Vision, Strategy & Influence: I think another thing that we want to see is the ability to navigate scope more broadly than just like the particular area that you operate in. And that looks like beyond just the areas that you technically own. So here at HubSpot, SPMs largely own pretty large scope. Sometimes that scope can be a little bit disconnected from one another, but it's usually, you know, within the context of like a group or a product line or something along those lines. As you start to move into some of these more, you know, GPM or director level positions, what we try to look for are people who can lead through influence, not just on the people leadership side of things, but also how are you influencing things to happen in the org that you may not actually own yourself. So I think the big thing there is to try to think about how you can deliver or not necessarily deliver but how can you influence strategic things within the org that can have outsized value for even things that you don't own. So I think being able to develop skills around strategy, storytelling, influence and things like that are really important to develop as well.

So yeah, I think those are probably some of the skills that you're going to want to lean into a lot no matter where you are if you want to move from an IC role into a manager role.