How to Climb the Product Management Ladder (Part 3)

My last two posts were about how to become a product manager and what you should learn in your first role(s). However, it is not rare to see professionals who practice product management for 10-15 years and even more.

There is no one-size-fits-all in terms of titles and usually, these long-haul individuals can be recognized with a Senior/Principal/Consultant Product Manager title. But regardless of title, what else do senior PM individuals have in their toolkit - and what should you look to achieve - to be recognized as a Senior PM?

How is a Senior Product Manager different from a Product Manager?

As an experienced product manager, the senior product manager leads by example. The best senior product managers consistently make thoughtful decisions based on evidence and a deep understanding of the market and the value for the customers. Ultimately, a senior product manager does the same thing as a product manager, but has a broader responsibility and impact on the product they lead.

Senior product managers are usually responsible for products or product sets that are expected to deliver a bigger payoff to the company and/or have higher visibility within the organization.

They also often (formally or informally) mentor other product managers. In some organizations, this is a hybrid role, where the senior product manager is still hands-on with a product and also has some line-management responsibility for more junior product managers.

What should you master in order to become a true Senior Product Manager?

You should be a master of the basics; skillful with talking with customers, understanding their challenges, and translating them effectively to the engineering team. A senior product manager can produce an effective and validated requirements document quite quickly even when there is some “fire drill” within the company. They are the people that see “A Problem” and know what needs to happen next. 

With great power comes great responsibility. As senior product managers are usually responsible for the more strategic, more revenue-generating products, it also means they need to know how to handle large scale.

“Large scale” can mean many things: large number of customers and users, large number of developers, huge amount of data, and sometimes a lot of competitive pressure.

With that list of challenges, any individual has to be very efficient with his time, but I’ve also noticed that analysis & synthesis skills come into play. These enable product managers on one hand to cover many topics, and on the other hand to continue prioritizing with high quality. These are things product managers should practice and refine as much as they can.

Lastly, what really differentiates senior product managers from non-senior product managers is their communication skills and ability to work with multiple different interfaces both inside and outside the organization. Unlike non-senior product managers, senior product managers will usually be exposed to a bigger portion of the company including sales & marketing, finance, business development, legal & compliance, security, and other departments. This is on top of their regular connection with engineering and support teams.

If you find yourself interacting with all these departments, you are probably already quite a famous figure in your organization, but the “real test” is your ability to interact with C-Level executives. 

For a non-senior product manager, interaction with C-level executives can feel like a firing squad. This is a time you need to give your best performance. You will need to be cool and explain in a simple manner why you asked to meet with them and what you would like to achieve.

Many times the audience will include executives with different levels of knowledge of the product you lead and the executives will have different objectives. Those interactions may deviate from the route you had in mind and you probably will need to justify, based on data and other inputs you have collected, a lot of decisions you have made. You will be challenged on every front.

A great phrase coined by the US President Harry S. Truman, summarizes this:

“If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” 

How do you know you’re ready to become a senior Product Manager?   

To be honest, you probably “just know” (and so does your manager and everyone around you, if you’re doing it right). But if you really want to ask yourself some simple questions, here’s a start:

1. Are you leading one of the most strategic products in your company?
2. If you are part of a team of product managers working on the same product, are you the go-to person when your manager needs help with something important?
3. Do you spend a substantial part of your day to day interacting with the business side of the house or you interact mostly with the technical part of the company?
4. How often and in which forums do you interact with C-level executives?

If the answer to the first three questions is “YES” and you find yourself in discussions with C-Level executives more often than some of your peers you probably should have a title that matches your seniority.

In my next and last blog in this series, I will discuss what I think is the biggest leap forward: how to move from an individual contributor position into a managerial position in the product world, what you should accomplish before this stage, and why it is so hard.

Stay tuned...