Abstracting the PM career ladder
The target audience for this post is early-to-mid career PMs who are seeking to simplify their mental model on career growth in PM
The limitations of typical PM ladders
Product Management is frequently seen as one of the most ambiguous and “open to interpretation” roles in the modern tech industry. It’s not uncommon to hear PMs share (often in a tone dripping with lament) how the core expectations of the PM function vary significantly across verticals, companies and even across different teams in the same company!
For PMs, there are no recognized certifications or standardized trainings in place to understand the basic needs of the role. There is at times an implicit expectation that teams & individual PMs need to simply “figure it out” when it comes to the expectations of PM…in a bespoke way, based on their unique context & needs.
“You’ll know a good PM when you see em!”
This variance and trial-by-error approach can be quite costly. I’ve often come across ambitious PMs who are stretched thin & burnt out because of the need to flex all their muscles at once to address the needs of their product & team. Product leaders spend countless hours & energy looking to calibrate expectations fairly across their teams, while mitigating their own biases based on what they’ve seen to work well in their personal experiences. And cross-functional partners often lack sufficient understanding and empathy to engage effectively with their PM counterparts.
At one end of the spectrum, the PM role can attain magical & mystical status within an organization - given it naturally has tentacles to every area of a product’s success. On the other end of the spectrum, the PM role is seen as no more than a useful glue function that doesn’t involve any “hard” skill - and will likely be automated out of existence by the AIs of the future1.
Well-intentioned product organizations look to mitigate the ambiguity of the role by developing PM career ladders & rubrics. These artifacts are designed to not only help “demystify” the role, but show a reasonable path to progression for career growth for the individual PMs at their company. Unfortunately, PM career ladders tend to end up being notoriously dense and checklist-y in nature - as various product leaders tend to tack-on more to the framework to ensure their team’s PM archetype is captured somehow. What this means is that PM career ladders might end up being more helpful to serve the org broadly, but less the individuals in it.
My intent with the remainder of this post is to help with the latter problem. My hope is to share a more abstracted & generalized way to think about the PM role, and how you can grow in it in your career (not just at your current company). I’ve been fortunate enough to see the PM role play out in multiple companies of very different sizes/maturity/business models/cultures - and have seen some common patterns emerge. These patterns are what I seek to share below.
Starting with the core
Over time, I’ve started to internalize the core expectations of the PM role to be around these 4 table-stakes needs:
Deeply empathize with the needs of your customers & users…
Then lead a team to design & deliver valuable solutions to address those needs…
While ensuring you can sustainably monetize this customer value…
So you earn the right to do it again & again, and ultimately accomplish your product’s mission.
There are many "what is PM?" articulations available out there, and the closest I’ve seen to my understanding above is this eloquent & crisp articulation from
:Your job is to delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways
There are a few important callouts worth emphasizing in this description of the role:
There is no explicit reference to the term “product” - though product is often the vehicle we use to deliver value to our customers.
There is a bi-directional relationship between delivering value & monetizing value - i.e. it’s not one or the other; we want to establish a “flywheel” between product & business value.
The PM role is positioned as a leadership function, by definition - regardless of the seniority/tenure of the individual.
Before moving on, it’s worth noting that this understanding above may not align with the expectations of the PM role at your company today - or your personal opinion. For example, I’ve personally seen orgs where PM is 100% focused on building product, and has no explicit accountability towards monetization. I’ve also been part of teams where PM was seen as a supporting function, not a leadership function. In my experience, these constraints are meaningfully limiting in the long-term.
Sharpening the dimensions
Assuming the articulation of the core of the PM role makes sense to you, let’s attempt to simplify this even further. Underlying the table-stakes above are essentially three sets of responsibilities:
Impacting customers & business outcomes positively
Leading the team effectively, so that they can achieve #1
Doing #1 and #2 over a meaningful time horizon
This is a much tighter set of dimensions we can try to internalize & evaluate. We can pressure-test this further by reframing the points above as questions:
Did you do valuable things for your customers & the business?
Did you make the team better, by showing them the way?
Did you achieve this in a sustainable way?
These dimensions can act as the foundation of a more generalized & abstract framework for thinking about PM performance2. They can also help us simplify the calibration process & understanding what expectations we might have of each level of the ladder.
For example, typically you'd expect early-career PMs to have limited scope of impact, while leaning more on leadership & direction from others. As you grow in your career, you expect not only your scope to expand - but for you to take a more primary role in leveling up the team & ensuring durable, longer-term success.
More on impact
I consider impact as the sum of results you achieve - for your customers first, and your business next - through both the product & non-product work of your team.
Much of the craft & expertise required to be an excellent PM is inherently captured here. To meaningfully impact customers requires deep understanding & empathy of who they are & their unmet needs - followed by creativity & collaboration to shape valuable solutions. To meaningfully impact the business requires understanding the unique context & strategy of your organization, and acumen to connect customer value to business value.
In all things product, context is king. And the context that matters the most when it comes to determining impact is that of the maturity of your product and business. For early stage products, impact is primarily related to validation (or otherwise) of the motivating hypotheses for how your product will positively add value to your target customers. For mature products, impact is primarily centered on driving an intentional mix of engagement, growth & monetization metrics that matter as you “expand” & “extract” along the product maturity S-curve.
A common mistake we make in PM circles is conflating impact with “scope”. Scope can be interpreted in many ways, for example:
Features vs. products vs. product lines
Range of surface areas & inter-dependencies being touched
Size of your product team
Regardless, while it’s certainly possible for impact to be positively correlated with larger scope, that is certainly not always the case - and is very likely not the case for your most impactful product innovations in their early days! A better way to think about the relationship between impact and scope is to primarily consider the scope of the problem space & opportunity you’re chasing - not the scope of the solution space.
Given the potential variance, it’s critical for PMs and organizations to be tightly aligned on the exact nature & size of impact they’re committing themselves to unlocking at any given time.
More on leadership
I asserted earlier that PM is a leadership role, by definition. There are a few reasons I believe this, and have seen this to be true across many organizations.
Generally speaking, product leadership requires one to:
Set a compelling direction
Coalesce a diverse group of teammates & internal partners to follow that direction
Identify, nurture & amplify the talent around you
Role-model org values & product principles across the team
Theoretically each of these leadership responsibilities could be done without a PM. For example, very small startups might not require dedicated PMs at all, as the founding team owns these responsibilities directly. At a certain point of scale though, the PM function can be a force multiplier for company leadership - to help lead increasingly large & more functionally distributed teams to deliver on world-class products & solutions.
It’s also important to frame this dimension of the PM role as leadership, not management. Leadership does not require one to formally manage other PMs. In fact, some of the best product leaders I’ve come across are dedicated ICs. I myself have moved between the IC and management role multiple times - each time feeling that the opportunity helped me develop as a leader.
More on time horizon
Time horizon is arguably the most subjective concept in this mental model. Impact to customers & the business can often be quantified, or otherwise proven. Leadership development is a topic that benefits from decades of research, philosophy and methodologies - so we have reasonable priors.
Time horizon adds depth to the PM framework, because it challenges us to consider the durability & sustainability of the impact & leadership you are bringing to the table. It is also a helpful dimension to add to understand the unique value you bring as a PM, beyond any inertia/momentum you may ride or battle in the near-term.
When it comes to time horizon, the further out we look, the more ambiguity we face. And the more ambiguity we face, the more divergence we have in our collective opinions about the best course of action to take near/mid term. For a PM to demonstrate impact & leadership over the long-term, it requires them to (a) set an opinionated product vision and (b) determine and align the best strategies to achieve it and (c) make good decisions as execution evolves. Underlying the ability to do this is strong judgement & deep customer-centricity.
I have come to believe that the compounded value of one’s judgement…applied across multiple timescales & consistently over the long-term… is a key ingredient for long-term career success for PMs.
It’s important to note that every company might have a different perspective on what near vs. mid vs. long term time horizons represent for them. Some may operate in weeks, others in months, and others in decades. If you, as an individual PM, are looking to shape a multi-year career arc, it’s really important for you to try to find an environment where you will be able to so in a way that will be valued & aligned with the organization you are a part of.
Rationalizing and actioning this
Impact, Leadership and Time Horizon is my attempt to boil down what really matters when it comes to PM development & growth at a high level. You might be asking now, is there a way to apply this?
I believe there are two very practical & actionable exercises you want to conduct, if you resonate with this frame.
The framing above is not intended to align tightly with the rubric being used at your company. Hopefully there is meaningful enough overlap that you feel good. If not, that can also be a useful takeaway?
This is where your personal growth goals really matter. Time to clarify.
Easy until it’s hard (you hit walls). Sub-linear.
This is more achievable and transparent at earlier stages of career. Which is why we often see quick progression for PMs from early career to mid levels. It’s like strong & rapid PMF.
The best growth stories typically reflect PMs growing on all these dimensions in parallel.
This is far more opaque and open to interpretation at mid-stages.
Some dimensions (ex: time horizon x impact) are malleable and require so much context to really know what’s going on & the unique role of the PM
PMs typically spike in some but not all areas in ways that become clearer at this stage of career. You can be an amazing early-stage product PM and suck at making the team around you better.
This is the stage where expectations <> reality typically most diverge. What got you here won’t get you there.
Some people break through… some people get promoted… org values & individual values can diverge. Requires excellent management → time for a different post → to handle these situations well.
Fun thought experiment: try a prompt like “As a PM for <company X>, what are the top 1-2 ways for me to improve my product?” in your favorite AI tool of choice & see where it takes you :)
One of the most common challenges with PM performance management is that review cycles tend to be more fast/frequent than the time you need to evaluate meaningful product/business/team outcomes. At best, a 6mo review cycle can give you a limited “just-in-time” snapshot into where a PM is at on each dimension of impact, leadership, time horizon.