Abstracting the PM career ladder: a corollary on the sacrifices of PM leadership
This is a short addendum to my previous post that introduced an abstracted PM career ladder designed around Impact, Leadership & Time Horizon.
In my previous post - Abstracting the PM career ladder - I introduced a framework for PMs to think about career growth generally, designed around the constructs of Impact, Leadership and Time Horizon (ILT).
One of the key takeaways from that post was that long-term growth as a PM is a uniquely 3-dimensional challenge. As a result, long-term success as a PM requires a series of intentional tradeoff choices on what dimensions you are leaning into & prioritizing at any given time. Making these tradeoff decisions well requires you to understand the needs of your product, your team and yourself as an individual.
There is a specific nuance to the ILT mental model that I feel requires a bit more detail to tease out, which I will cover in this brief post today. The nuance is about the inherent sacrifices that PMs must make, as they grow up along the leadership axis.
The inherent sacrifices of PM leadership
I vehemently believe that all PMs should be considered - by themselves & those around them - as leaders. This belief underscores why I treat Leadership as one of the 3 cornerstones of the ILT framework. For PMs to grow in their careers - they must expand their leadership responsibilities and skillsets as well. This is explicitly true for PMs who transition into managerial roles (PM leads, GPMs, etc.), but I’ve found it to be implicitly true for very senior individual contributor (IC) PMs too.
However an interesting, counter-intuitive thing often happens as PMs start to develop their leadership muscles more. As they begin to flex into leadership, their performance very often takes an abrupt & unexpected hit in the near-term. And that dip in observable performance tends to tightly correlate with their increasing scope of leadership.
I’ve now observed this pattern play out multiple in my career (including in my own career), and have frequently seen it be explained away as simple “growing pains” of an expanded role. However I am now convinced that there is something deeper going on.
The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that in the visual of ILT above, career growth as a PM is visualized as increasingly large rhombuses as opposed to increasingly larger curves. This choice of illustration was intentional on my part - as a way to infer the sacrifices I now believe are inherent in growing as a leader in the role. Rather than linearly growing your “area under the curve” as you grow in your PM career - in reality, you *must* lose an amount of control & alignment, to enable you to grow as a leader.
Sacrifices in the form of loss & tension
In an ideal world, PM leaders act as powerful force-multipliers & amplifiers for their product areas and their teams. But for them to realize that aspiration, they require building a significant amount of leverage, scale & influence. And even more than before - they must achieve success through a larger & more diverse set of people (their teams, counterparts, stakeholders, leaders) than before.
In my experience, the sacrifices I refer to manifest in two ways:
Your ability to directly drive impact & quality execution goes down, as you must work through other PMs or team-members who “do the work”. This can be considered a loss of control.
As you increasingly clarify the long-term direction (vision, strategy) of your product area, you may drift further away from your teams who are relatively more focused on the work of today. This requires you to spend more energy building alignment & buy-in with them. This extra labor can be considered a tension around direction-setting.
For PMs who are earlier in their leadership development - the combination of a loss of control with more tension around directional alignment can lead to an immense struggle. And I believe this emerging struggle is often the cause of the near-term performance impact I highlight above.
Said differently - to grow as a PM leader requires you to give up some amount of control (Impact) & expend more energy on managing the tension of direction-setting (Time Horizon).
Here are a couple of examples of how this struggle may manifest for the poor PM leader in question:
To mitigate any near-term risks to impact, they may revert to more familiar, controlling methods - which can disempower and frustrate their teams. And even themselves - since it may take away from the kind of leader they wish to be.
To build alignment and buy-in on the longer-term direction of the product, they often spend countless hours trying to bring everyone along on the journey. But with likely many more people in their sphere of influence and potentially diverging opinions to wrangle - the entire process is overwhelming, time-intensive, and akin to a game of whack-a-mole.
Accepting the sacrifices
The intent of this post is to identify & name the tradeoffs PMs must make relative to the other attributes of the PM role for them to grow as leaders. So firstly, I encourage you to reflect on your personal experiences related to these leadership sacrifices - either as an emerging PM leader yourself, or having perhaps worked directly with one.
The intent of this post is not to “problem-solve” the tradeoffs. In fact, I don’t believe the concepts articulated in this post is a problem at all. In my opinion, making sacrifices in pursuit of being a better & more effective leader is a good and natural thing.
For every ounce of lost control your may personally incur, you are potentially opening up a pound of opportunity for a talented team member to grow into & thrive. This makes a near-term performance dip worth it, as long as it leads to bigger gains across the entire team over time.
For every inch of increased vision & strategy you bring to the table for your product - you may open up feet or miles of runway for it to succeed and grow. The added effort it requires to bring people along on that journey is high-leverage in nature & can be made more efficient through structure & intentional systems of engagement.
The key, as with the entire ILT framework, is to balance intentionally across the dimensions of PM growth over time. In that vein, I hope this post helps you better understand and triangulate your personal status quo. And if so, I would hope that it motivates you to intentionally game-plan your leadership journey over the coming weeks, months and years ahead.
Best wishes!