The leap from Senior Product Manager to Product Leader is so difficult that we call it "Crossing the Career Canyon". As we’ve discussed before, what helped you to succeed as a Sr PM won’t make you a great Product Leader. It's a trap, right in the middle of your career, just when you thought you had it all figured out.
So how do motivated PMs avoid flaming out when making this difficult transition? What new skills and abilities to they need to survive and thrive as a Product Leader?
We've spent the past year creating our Product Strategy program to help Sr PMs make the leap successfully.
We've taken what we’ve learned building that program to create some introductory resources to help you identify some of the problem areas you could face while making the transition:
Blog post: Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader Understand the Career Canyon and why it’s so difficult to cross.
Blog post: Product Work Beyond Product-Market Fit Explore the four kinds of product work you need to understand to become an effective Product Leader.
Webinar: Crossing the Canyon for PMs. In the webinar below, Fareed Mosavat, Casey Winters, and Brian Balfour walk through the four key changes that you need to make to become a Product Leader.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from the event...
Working across all four types of product work
"As you expand your role, you're going to be asked to make decisions about the kinds of product work that you may not have done before, but you still need to understand them and have some frameworks for how to think about those things, which is super important." - Fareed Mosavat, EIR at Reforge, former Director of Product at Slack
"Any type of success in one area forces you to address other areas of product work. When I started at Pinterest, growth was definitely the main problem. But then as we solved a bunch of growth-related problems, a lot of the issues arose around missing features or product-market fit expansion. So doing a lot of the same work that we were doing to drive growth, was going to have a diminishing returns or even potentially negative returns without focusing on some of these other product work areas. Knowing how to approach these new problems was critical. " - Casey Winters, CPO at Eventbrite
"Depending on which type of product work you're focused on right now, there is a more natural candidate as to what type of product you will run into next. If you are focusing on Growth, you're going to run into either scaling work or you're going to run into product-market fit expansion to new markets. Most likely, those are going to be the two that you run into at some point. If you are focusing on Product-Market Fit expansion, you're going to immediately run into growth and features on and and and vice versa for some different examples. I think the key thing is to recognize it. Adjust your approach. So you're more successful in creating holistic value for yourself and for the business." - Casey Winters
“One of the things we were trying to do when I joined Pinterest was to build SEO into a growth channel. We ended up being very successful at doing this and as we got more successful, we were continuing to push for more and more. Then, a Google algorithm change occurred and essentially our traffic dropped dramatically overnight. So it really forced us to come to this understanding of, Oh, wait, now that we've actually built up this growth channel, it's not just about growing and growing and growing – it's about being able to maintain and rely on it for the long term. it. This pushed us this into a lot of scaling work, even though we were technically on the growth team. To ensure that we're doing all the things to maintain the quality of the traffic that was coming in and to make sure that Google thought we were serving quality content and things like that. So it's not just that you can have diminishing returns, you can actually have negative returns from continuing to do the things that drove so much value to the business.” - Casey Winters
What great looks like at the Product Leader level
"The best feedback I received as a product leader, 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, EIR at Reforge, former Head of Growth at Instagram
What do to if you fine yourself in the "New Manager Death Spiral"
“Step one [to getting yourself out of a manager death spiral] is to recognize that your team probably already knows and they most likely have a desire to help. So what you need to do is the counterintuitive thing and say, hey, I'm overloaded, I need help and ask someone who reports to you to help. That's a difficult thing to do because it defies all of your expectations and like social norms, etc. about what it means to lead. But what you will often find is that the person you ask is excited and has twice as much bandwidth and twice as much incentive because it’s a level up for them.” - Fareed Mosavat
You Are Responsible for Negotiating the Terms of Your Success
"One of the biggest failure factors I see for new directors is they get excited about the big picture problem. So let's use, for instance, the example of a new growth team and they say, 'we need an activation team and retention team and, a monetization team and engagement team etc etc.' and they get, they end up with like six or seven major initiatives that they're kind of working on in order to own the whole problem and they're doing all of them at a B- or C level instead of doing one thing or two things at an A+ level. As a leader, you're now responsible for defining the mandate that you are responsible for and doing the best possible job against it, you're not taking initiatives from top-down and responding to them. You are now responsible for pushing the priorities up, and I think this is an area where people really get themselves into trouble when they first lead because they think leadership is about breadth and collecting things, when in reality, it's sometimes about shedding things and delegating things." - Fareed Mosavat
To learn the strategies and frameworks to cross the Career Canyon safely, consider applying to the next cohort of our Product Strategy program.