What's a typical career path for a consumer product manager?

From a career ladder perspective, the typical career path is

• PM/Senior PM working within a specific team and demonstrating ability to execute, deliver and prioritize
• Group PM managing multiple Product Managers and their respective teams usually driven by an expansion of remit / impact area
• Director/Sr. Director Representing product stragegy and roadmap and influencing decisions at the peer and executive level
• VP+ owning full product or business lines, accountable for key metrics

Generally your career growth in Product is very closely aligned to the size of business impact. As your impact grows, so do the size of your team to deliver on that impact and the key strategic muscle to prioritize and deliver on that impact.  

A typical consumer path is generally surface ownership expansion. As you grow your career, the more of the product (and thus impact) you own. An example would be on a classic core experience team, you may start owning search as a PM, then own Search and Navigation as a GPM with ~2 teams below you, to ulitmately owning the full core experience (Search, Nav, Home etc). Within this growth, you typically grow your team and also go from owning a single clearly defined metric that is easily measureable to a metric more closely aligned to the companies top line KPI but can be more difficult to measure direct impact.

There are also specialized cases like AI/ML work for personalization and recommendation engines where you can grow your career but your surface ownership stays the same, but the business impact grows.

Early in your career, focus on absorbing and learning as much as you can -- what product management is, what plays naturally to your strengths and interests. Explore, be hungry, be curious. Tap into what really excites you and you’ll discover what you really enjoy. Lean into opportunities to gather different skills and gain exposure to different industries and domains.

By the time you hit mid-career and know you want to do consumer product management, you’ll also get a sense for what you enjoy and what you don’t. For e.g:, As a Senior PM, I knew that I enjoyed building marketplace B2C products. I also knew that I wanted to experience product management in both -- established companies and in startups.

Then I moved into people management, because coaching and giving back to the community felt like a natural way to transition my knowledge and scale up my responsibilities. I could have also chosen to be an IC and then become a senior IC as well.

Typically if you’re in a leadership role, you could move to a VP Product or CPO role. You could also grow into these roles without people management responsibilities (it depends on the company) but it's less common. In senior leadership roles, you are moving from the driver’s seat into laying the railroads for your teams to execute well, so you can focus on vision, strategy and hiring. In some cases, you may also assume P&L responsibilities.

I’ve seen people with product backgrounds grow in product, become founders in companies, move into Venture Capital, move into COO or other C-suite roles, and really what it comes down to is understanding where your strengths and interests lie, and architecting your product career to help you grow into your dream role.

I'll directly answer the question, but then challenge it.

The most typical path that I've seen has been starting as an Associate/Junior PM after completing either a Computer Science, Information Systems or Business undergrad degree.

However ... in my opinion, PM is a craft that benefits more than any other from diverse backgrounds. I've worked with PMs who were previously marketers, project managers, engineers, business development managers and designers. In fact, due to the varied backgrounds from each of the PMs I work with, I learn about new ways to approach problems. All that to say, there is less of a focus on the typical path / background nowadays so that shouldn't stop folks from exploring PM if they are working in a different space currently. Google does a good job recognizing this with our PM Rotator program - employees can spend 20% of their time (with the blessing from their manager) working on a PM project from a sponsored team to see if the role is a fit for them.