7 Dimensions That Determine Product Management Career Path

Q: What does the career path of a Product Manager look like? How do the responsibilities change as you progress?

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First of all, I've realized that any attempt to generalize what each product manager job title does is a futile exercise. Every company has their own definition & boundaries so it vastly varies.

Ex: An associate product manager at Google might be equivalent to a product manager at a startup in terms of scope. Similarly, a group product manager at Uber might be equivalent to a Director or VP in another established company.

Moreover, the length of a product manager career runway depends on the company's growth phase, number of products & product culture.

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Thus, keeping job titles aside, I'll share the dimensions Product Managers expand on as they progress in their career:

(a) Product count

You start supervising more product lines than one. In Group PM or Director roles, you're also piloting new product launches.

Ex: I started off with Yallamotor at Bayt. By the time I got to a Director level, I had to oversee 5 products.

(b) Ecosystem vs. Standalone

You start looking into how a group of products can work in tandem to build a suite of solutions.

Ex: We started work on connecting Talentera, Evalufy & AfterHire as parts of a recruitment tech stack.

(c) Shift in vertical

You may be elected to jump to another domain to start a new product line or innovation.

(d) More strategy, less ops

As you progress, you're likely to spend more time uncovering the next 10x opportunity that will unlock new audiences rather than worrying about the specifics of a feature.

(e) More people management

As you grow, you have to lead product resources (from PMs to Product Owners to BAs) to get ground-level activities done. This also meant a lot more interviewing, hiring and onboarding.

(f) More cross functional purview

As you surge higher, you tend to interlock more with the broader org like marketing, sales & customer support and envisage how product work will affect their roles.

(g) Business metrics than product metrics

In the start, I was looking into feature metrics like adoption metrics. Then, I was accountable for overall NPS. Much later on, it was about revenue, churn & ARPU - metrics vital to business health.

I will say though that each progression did NOT come naturally to me. I struggled at every jump.

Ex: I had to get comfortable with things that weren't my forte e.g. pricing products, reviewing COGS & monitoring PnLs.

Also, transitioning from an individual contributor mindset to a team driver role demands a reset of sorts.

Ex:

• I had to learn how to delegate, pass ownership & spread credit
• I had to manage up in a more intricate manner
• I had to engineer processes that worked for the team

So, the product career is an ocean.

Regardless of what title you gain as you progress, you'll keep solving harder problems.