Everyone seems to have their own definition of what product management actually is, and as a result, navigating a product management career path can be incredibly ambiguous and frustrating. Job titles and descriptions vary greatly across companies. The criteria for advancement within organizations can seem vague and subjective.
Even worse, there's a hidden trap right in the middle of the product manager career path where many of the brightest product managers fail — we've seen numerous careers stall at the transition from Senior Product Manager to a Product Leader (sometimes referred to as a Group Product Manager, Dir of Product, or Product Lead).
Let's explore why this is the most difficult career transition for many product managers.
Table of Contents:
Meet Our Authors:
Fareed Mosavat is the Chief Development Officer (CDO) at Reforge and the former Director of Product at Slack, focused on growth in the freemium, self-service business. Previously, he led growth and product teams at Instacart, Zynga, and other startups. Fareed is one of Silicon Valley’s foremost experts on product-led growth in both consumer and bottoms-up SaaS companies, and he has a deep background building and leading experimentation teams.
Casey Winters is a CPO at Eventbrite, former Growth Advisor in Residence at Greylock Partners, Growth Lead at Pinterest and first marketer at Grubhub. He advises companies including Tinder, Hipcamp, Reddit, Canva, Pocket, and others on scaling and growth, specializing in retention and engagement.
Additional insights provided by:
Bangaly Kaba
EIR @ Reforge
Former Head of Growth @ Instagram
Ravi Mehta
Former CPO @ Tinder,
Product @ Facebook, TripAdvisor
What got you here, won't get you there
There is a core reason why the step to Product Leader is the hardest; it's an almost completely different job requiring several new abilities like product strategy. Said another way, what gets you to a senior product manager, won’t make you successful as a product leader. And no one tells you that this particular transition creates a number of jumps you need to make and series of traps you need to avoid.
Let's think about the product career journey as a hike up a mountain. You go from APM → PM → SPM by strengthening a similar set of muscles and skills. You keep solving similar problems, but the problems just get harder. But all of a sudden you reach the transition to a Product Leader. It's not just a steeper part of the mountain — it's actually a wide canyon. To cross that canyon is not a more intense version of the same problem. It's a totally new set of problems that requires completely different muscles, skills, and tools to cross it.
Going from APM → PM → SPM, you can keep doing similar things with deeper sophistication, more subject matter expertise, and better execution. But continuing to pursue those things will actually get you stuck at the Product Lead transition and you'll never break through to the next level. It's hard to get out of the motion that initially made you successful.
Great execution at Senior Product Manager does not mean you will make a good Product Leader. You can continue to put wins on the board and still not make the jump. There are four key transitions you need to make:
Depth in one type of product work → Breadth across multiple types of product work
Being good at your job → training others to be good at theirs
Solving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing others
Gaining more personal scope → Creating more scope for the organization
And the kicker? You need to do all of this when the incentives aren't aligned. Let's dive into each of these in more detail.
The Product Manager Career Path
Part of the problem in navigating your product manager career path is the ambiguity of titles. Titles mean very different things across different companies. A "Product Manager" at Airbnb is a "Senior Product Manager" at LinkedIn and could be "Head of Product" at an early-stage company. Take a look at a comparison of five different companies courtesy of Levels.fyi.
Instead of focusing on titles, it is best to think about your role in terms of ownership, scope of product/solution, and influence. So let's first level set on what we specifically mean by titles like "Senior Product Manager," "Group Product Manager" or "Product Lead." Below you'll find a simplified journey one can take in product and how key things like ownership and influence change. We've included examples of from Eventbrite and Slack for the different levels.
Depth in one type of product work → Breadth across multiple types of product work
Not all product work is created equal. After initial product-market fit, there are four categories of product problems that need to be managed and sequenced:
Feature Work - Creating and capturing value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.
Growth Work - Creating and capturing value by accelerating adoption and usage by the existing market.
Scaling Work - Focuses on bottlenecks to ensure the team can continue to move forward and take on new levels of feature, growth, and product-market fit expansion work.
Product-Market Fit Expansion - Increasing the ceiling on product-market fit in a non-incremental way by expanding into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both.
Each type of product problem has its own process, measures of success, and execution factors. But as you grow in the early phases of the product function, you tend to build expertise and depth in one of these areas.
“When I joined Pinterest, I was very focused on improving the key metrics of the business as growth Product Manager. Fast forward two years, and as a growth leader I found myself much more concerned about making sure these metrics could continue to perform at the level they were. This required a completely different type of product work. So we went from running experiments all of the time to building pipelines and maintaining tools and building monitoring and building better processes for technical and design debt. “ - Casey Winters, CPO at Eventbrite
Having A Wider Vision Of Product Problems
Many product professionals don't recognize that there are fundamentally different types of product work. This leads to a hammer/nail problem, where you over-rely on the tool that you are familiar with. You might have worked on zero-to-one products and therefore treat every product problem with the same process and approach. Or you might have worked on growth product problems, and therefore treat everything as a growth product problem.
To be successful as a Product Leader, you need to have knowledge of all the different types of product problems and lead your team to work on the right ones at the right time without getting into the weeds of the work itself.
Part of being a good product leader means you understand how to build a qualitative growth model, which offers an easily communicable tool, team alignment, and a way to evaluate the strategic big picture. Get a free Growth Series program lesson on how to build a qualitative growth model by clicking the offer below!
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Maximizing ROI Across Different Types Of Product Work
Recognizing product problems isn't enough – you need to be able to lead and facilitate the intersection of each product problem. Comparing growth problems to feature work is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Yet, you have to make decisions on what to do and when.
“A bad approach to product is to think about the stuff you are doing and the stuff you aren't doing. You need to think 'We're doing X so we can do Y so we can get to Z within T timeframe.' At the Group Product Manager level all of those variables become more complex.” - Fareed Mosavat, former Director of Product at Slack
At the Senior Product Manager level you are thinking about how to maximize the return of an individual type of work. As a PL you need to know how to maximize the overall Return on Investment between all the different types of product work.
“You need to think beyond a single feature and start thinking about how features and other work connect to each other — how they ladder up to a clear, compelling, cohesive vision for the product and how they connect to the company’s strategy. This is the point at which Product Managers begin to shift to Product Leaders.” - Ravi Mehta, former CPO at Tinder, Product at Facebook, Tripadvisor
Going From An "I" Shape To a "T" Shape
It is nearly impossible to be an expert in two of these areas, let alone all of them. Before becoming a Product Leader you have likely spent most of your time working on 1, maybe 2. Your shape looks more like an "I." So no matter what, you almost always have lack of experience in at least 2 of these areas. You need to transition from the "I" to a "T" shape. In other words, you have to find a way to gain enough knowledge in your gaps to have a wider vision across and be able to maximize in-between them. This is one of the core areas the Reforge Product Strategy program focuses on.
Being good at your job → Training others to be good at theirs
The reason you get the opportunity to be a Product Leader is because you've done an incredible job of executing well by solving problems, with creativity, on time, to create real results. But as we mentioned before, you can continue to put individual wins on the board without demonstrating that you are or will be successful in a Product Leader role.
Instead, you have to go from being good at your job to training others to be good at theirs. Your value is evaluated not on your personal output but on the total output of your team. Just because you are great at executing, doesn't mean you are good or will be good at teaching others. Why?
Your Natural Strengths = The Hardest To Teach
Everyone has natural strengths. We tend to lean on those natural strengths to generate great execution. But the things you understand the most naturally are the things that are the hardest to teach. You've never had to "learn" them yourself in a more structured way. You've learned them by intuition or "just figuring it out."
“When I joined Eventbrite, I started asking teams to build their strategies and instead largely received just roadmaps. Many teams didn't naturally understand how to build and communicate a strategy, and I wasn't giving direction on how to do it because building the strategy was natural for me. I had to course correct and be more explicit. So I met with each product leader individually to walk through the roadmap and ask why every project on the roadmap was included, and highlighted to them whenever I heard a strategic principle. The next quarter, they all completed their strategies without any of my help.” - Casey Winters
When you are forced to learn something that doesn't come naturally, you are able to point to resources and methods that helped you learn. You can more viscerally call on specific examples, steps, and struggles. It's easier to put yourself in the "beginner's mind" and communicate it.
But when something comes more naturally, it's hard to take yourself back to that beginner's mind. It's harder to deconstruct and figure out what to draw on to help another person.
“Writing initially didn't come naturally to me — I had to work at it. As a result, I can point someone to all the resources that helped me. The Minto Pyramid, 'On Writing' by Stephen King, Bottom-Line-Up-Front. On the other hand, exploratory data analysis came more naturally. It was never something I sought out resources to learn. I just figured it out along the way. It took me a long time to figure out how to help someone with data vs. my instincts to just do it myself.” - Fareed Mosavat
The Manager Death Spiral
The most common trap this leads to is keeping the most important projects for yourself. Because you got to this level by being a great executor, the natural thought process is: "This is important, I can create a better outcome myself, therefore I should do it." The first two parts of that statement are often true. It is important and you probably can do it better yourself. But here is what happens when you do this:
Stolen Learning Opportunity - You've taken an opportunity to learn away from someone on your team.
Trap Yourself In The Weeds - You've taken away your ability to spend time on the hard strategic work that makes you successful in the Group Product Manager role because you are in the weeds of delivering a hard and important project.
Holding The "Secrets" - You end up not communicating the things that you know that will help others be better at their job because when you are the one executing, you aren't forced to.
The hard part is you don't realize this behavior is trap. Taking the most important projects yourself often works for a short period. Eventually, though, your team's development stalls, their motivation declines, you're late to ask for additional resources, and your personal progression fizzles out. Michael Lopp refers to this as "The New Manager Death Spiral."
“At one point at Slack, there was an initiative to rebuild the checkout flow. It was a complex project and I wanted to make sure everyone would be happy. I initially had it on the list of things I would do. I then realized that if I did that, it would take away the opportunity for a key Product Manager on my team to work on a complex, design-heavy project, which would be an important milestone for a future promotion. Thankfully I noticed this and handed off the project.” - Fareed Mosavat
Solving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing others
Most of your work early in your product career is driven by a heads-down mentality — working on what you are directly responsible for and can change. But switching to a Product Leader means quickly learning to work across vs. heads down.
You have to move beyond solving with the resources you have and begin to influence others in the org to solve problems outside your direct span of control. You need to start identifying the full set of things blocking your problem area, and influencing others in the org to do that work. In addition, rather than being given a set of resources, you become responsible for defining and explaining which resources you need, why you need them, and communicating that up, down and across the org.
Why It Happens Or Why It's Difficult
This shift can be difficult for many product professionals to make for a few reasons:
More Ownership ≠ More Success
There is a general feeling that in order to execute, you need to own more. To a certain point that is true. But as we'll talk about further in the post, this hits diminishing returns. You can't own and do everything and still do an A+ job.
Influencing Up and Across Is A New Skill
As a Senior Product Manager, you are primarily responsible for influencing the engineers and designers on your immediate team while communicating more broadly. As a Product Lead, you need to influence across different functions, and you deal with different audiences who have a variety of different needs. Influencing is not telling someone some information. Influencing is being convincing enough to drive someone to do something. You need to learn how to do this with people who are not knowledgeable and living within your function and problem area on a day-to-day basis.
You Are No Longer Judged On Your Own Success
When you are an individual Product Manager, you are judged on the success of the things you directly worked on. Did the feature you shipped drive business results? Did customers love it? Did it get done with creativity and efficiency? But as a Product Leader you start getting judged on all aspects of an area of responsibility, whether or not something was within your direct ownership.
“One of the things I've highlighted with Product Managers at this stage of their career is that early Product Manager promotions are based almost entirely on personal performance, but product leadership promotions are based partly on personal performance and partly on business need. To take the next step, you need to not just show that you are ready, but demonstrate the impact to the business. “- Ravi Mehta
Treating The Problem Holistically
The difference in the shift is treating a problem holistically. Rather than figuring out how to solve a problem with the hammer and nails you have (e.g. engineers and designers on your immediate team), you need to identify the best way to solve the problem, irrespective of the tool and resources you directly have, and find a way to facilitate that solution. Let's think about a couple of examples:
Working On Monetization
You've been assigned the problem of monetization. A Senior Product Manager may get to work on the pricing page and checkout flow because that's the real estate they own. A Product Lead tackling the same problem is going to make sure that measuring customer willingness to pay is part of new feature dev for other teams, that new features are packaged right, and ultimately that a new system of monetization is enabled within the company.
“When I started at Eventbrite, we had a small monetization team working on pricing and packaging. The feature teams at the time would put every new feature into the baseline package. Once we created our pillar structure, the Group Product Managers of these feature teams started figuring out the right model for how to charge for their areas. They worked to influence the monetization team to create new packaging capabilities to charge for the value their teams were creating rather than give everything away in a base package." - Casey Winters
Working On Activation
You've been assigned the problem of activation. A Senior Product Manager may work on owning the product flow of Activation that they own to drive improvements. A Product Lead will identify all the things blocking success across teams, which might include the wrong analytics, an improvement in the experimentation system, a mismatch between the users being acquired by marketing and what the product is built for, notifications to users not being aligned with the activation experience, and more.
"One of the pillars I managed at Pinterest was around user acquisition. The company had goaled us on signups since I started at the company. We had gotten so skilled in this area we could point to a future in which we would signed up most internet users in the U.S. So me and my engineering counterpart proposed a change in our metrics and our goals to maximize the activation rate of the remaining internet users in the U.S., aligned with the activation pillar on a new metric and handoff points between those teams, and pitched it to leadership successfully." - Casey Winters
Gaining more individual scope → Creating more scope for the org
“I distinctly remember at Facebook we had Don Faul, CEO of Athos, come in and speak to us. He used to be in the Navy. He told us about a saying in the Navy: 'Ship is greater than Shipmate which is greater than Self.' To be successful as a Product Lead you have to prove you can think about and improve the ship, not just yourself. – Bangaly Kaba, former Head of Growth at Instagram
To jump the canyon to Group Product Manager, one key is figuring out how to create more scope and opportunities for the organization. To do this requires you to flip some behaviors.
Own More, Do a B+ Job vs. Own Less, Enable an A+ Job
Much of going from APM to a SPM is about gaining more individual scope that you and your team work on. For example, you might go from:
Pricing Page
Billing and Checkout
Free to Paid Conversion
For years, you are working hard to gain that additional scope and responsibility. But at some point doing this you will start to hit diminishing returns because you can't do all the work yourself.
Instead, you actually need to do the opposite and reduce your scope by shedding parts of your responsibility to enable new teams around them. This feels very counterintuitive after years of trying to gain additional scope. But the decision here is that you can either keep it all yourself and do a B job at it, or you can shed these areas to enable them to all be A+. Your responsibility goes from gaining more scope to identifying where there are holes and advocating filling those holes.
“Being a Product Leader is not about collecting. Sometimes it is about shedding responsibility, adding responsibility, or influencing others. Knowing when to use which tool to drive the most customer impact is what makes you a successful Product Leader.” - Fareed Mosavat
“I've worked on the email and notifications infrastructure at every company I'd ever worked at. And at Pinterest, I worked with a few engineers to rebuild the entire infrastructure and own the strategy. I knew it really well. We still hired a Product Manager to take it over, and he was much better at it than I was!” - Casey Winters
Creating The Systems And Processes
Letting go of the execution so that more scope can be created for the org often comes down to creating the systems and processes. These systems need to be designed so that you can get enough context and give enough context on a consistent basis in order to identify problems to course correct or escalate. It's a tricky balance. If you make too many decisions, you aren't helping your team get better at their job, but if you don't escalate the right problems then that creates a separate set of issues.
“The best feedback I received as a manager, was someone told me they valued but didn't understand how I could walk in a room with 30% of the context and identify what's wrong and help course correct. But this is the essence of the Product Lead role. Your job is to understand what is going on, what the outcomes should be, and quickly figure out how you can help course correct.” - Bangaly Kaba
The Incentives Aren't Aligned
The transition to Product Leader is not an evolution of the Senior Product Manager role — it is a completely different job. To get there you need to be able to move from:
Executing one type of product work, to managing multiple types of product work.
Being good at your job, to teaching others how to be good at theirs.
Solving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing others
Gaining more individual scope, to creating more scope for the organization.
In most situations, you need to show that you are capable of these things while you are still in the Senior Product Manager role. But you won't find most of the above in the job description for Senior Product Managers or as part of your regular performance reviews. That means the feedback mechanisms and rewards as a Senior Product Manager aren't incentivizing you to show the capabilities of a Product Lead.
It is a huge help to have a manager that recognizes all of the above. You will need guidance as to which of these areas to start working on and when is the right time. Most importantly, you will need to tell the story of your capabilities to get to the next level.
To go deeper on these concepts while getting guidance from Fareed, Casey, Bangaly and other leaders, join us in an upcoming cohort of our Product Strategy program or our Product Leadership program. These transition points in your career can be the difference-maker, and we'd like to help you accelerate through them.
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