If you’ve lived through any annual reviews with a product management team, you undoubtedly know that familiar moment when your high-performance, high-potential, individual contributor product manager utters the dreaded phrase: “When do I get to manage somebody?”
Budding managers don’t ask that question – but talented ICs who are thinking about their career prospects sure do. And you can bet good money that an urgency around people management is a sign of ambition, but it’s a terrible indicator of success.
If you are lucky, you can mostly keep the outstanding ICs engaged with increasingly valuable work (and pay packages), while picking the talented people managers out to lead the group. More often, you’ll lose good PMs to management opportunities elsewhere, or promote them into roles in which they are unlikely to thrive. But why do we keep setting up this situation in the first place?
It’s high time for all of us to be using dual product management tracks that don’t force product managers to become people managers. If your organization already does this, great! If not, you should consider whether you’re getting the best out of your product managers and at the same time ensuring effective people management.
Why we should distinguish people management from product management
People management is challenging. It’s a distinct skill set, separate from the vision and leadership qualities that serve product managers so well. While great product managers are often natural leaders, they may not be interested in or suited for management roles.
One reason is that core product management skills, such as empathy with users and ad-hoc problem solving, can sometimes mislead new managers when dealing with team dynamics. I’ve seen talented product managers struggle early in their careers when asked to manage junior PMs, because they’re trying to problem solve rather than nurture.
Another significant reason many product managers end up disliking management is the time commitment—people management consumes a lot of time. Balancing time between team members and product responsibilities is extremely difficult, and it can be a let-down to have to pause product work to have yet another coaching 1:1.
The perverse incentives that pressure product managers
Yet despite these and many other excellent reasons not to follow a people-management path, virtually every product manager wants that career track. Why? Because individual contributor is seen as an early stage of career progression, and management the route to recognition, growth, and access to leadership (not to mention more money!) So talented product managers advocate for promotions to team management, and often find themselves unhappy with the switch.
If we didn’t do this – if we used a dual-track approach to create managers where needed but also create space for meaningful promotion and growth for those who want to keep managing products – we’d be better equipped to match our inventory of talent to our needs.
Convinced? I hope so! Let’s look at the next step. To implement dual-track product management, there are a few requirements we need to meet.
What you’ll need to build an IC ladder for product managers
First, we need one track for people management in product—because the Chief Product Officer can’t manage everyone personally—and a separate track for ICs. These tracks should be parallel in terms of seniority and compensation, eliminating the incentives to pick one track or the other for personal reasons.
Second, the IC track needs measurable criteria, with both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks that ICs can work on with their managers. These measures must be relevant at each level, avoiding messy changes in how we evaluate PMs over time, and we should have as few measures as possible, to avoid creating large matrices that make evaluation difficult.
Here are four key categories that I’ve used with success in the past:
- Hard Skills: Mastery of core product management skills is essential. These include leading customer interviews, performing market analysis, defining product scope and audience, writing requirements, prioritizing features and bugs, and collaborating with engineering.
- Cross-Functionality: Effective product managers must work across different functions to deliver a complete product. This involves collaborating with engineering, marketing, pre-sales, post-sales support, operations, and leadership. As product managers take on larger projects, their ability to work across organizational boundaries should improve, and this can be measured through feedback and outcomes.
- Leadership: Product managers must be able to project a complete product vision and influence others. This includes enrolling individuals, managers, teams, and other leaders in their vision. The extent of their influence within the organization is a key measure of their leadership.
- Accountability: This measures how much responsibility a product manager can handle without requiring much oversight. It’s about delivering features, themes, projects, and products independently. The more they can handle, the better. This is often assessed by their manager but is easily measured by outcomes.
By focusing on these categories, we can create clear paths for advancement within product management without forcing individuals into people management roles. This approach ensures that product managers can excel based on their strengths and preferences, ultimately benefiting both the individual and the organization.
Third, we need level descriptions that are defined in terms of our measures, and explain how at each level we should be interpreting and evaluating the measures. What does this look like in practice? Here are three real examples of product management levels defined by these four criteria.
Examples of Product Manager Levels, Measures and Criteria
PM1
Hard skills: You’re coming in from another discipline and you’re in your first 12 months of Product Management. You bring your expert skills from another discipline (analyst, designer, engineer, SE) to the table and have great instincts for what would improve the product fit with its users. You are responsible for taking technical needs – from customer requests, engineering input, competitive analysis and use of the product – and turning them into product requirements. You track feature development through engineering and reliably report on the delivery of new functionality. You participate in prioritization and advocate for the urgency of your requirements.
Cross-functionality: You partner readily with engineering and work with the team to get your questions answered and develop feature specifications. You have relationships in the support and SE organization, developed primarily through building feature requests or answering questions for specific customers.
Leadership: You have internalized the company positioning and our overall product vision, and you deeply understand the user personas around which our products are built. You can clearly frame for engineering and for sales and support which personas benefit from your requirements and how those requirements enhance the product fit.
Accountability: You are accountable for individual features and bugs, from documenting requirements through development and to delivery. You take responsibility for finding, reporting, tracking and closing out any customer issues with your features.
Senior PM
Hard skills: Writing requirements is second nature to you; you deliver expertise and product planning for your themes whenever we put together strategic plans. You prioritize features and bugs efficiently and without oversight. You are able to present the entire product roadmap to customers and you understand the stages of the sales process well enough to scope what information you share.
Cross-functionality: Engineering, pre- and post-sales consider you a critical partner. You put together technical enablement content for sales engineering and support, and work together with them routinely to support customer requests and technical sales calls. You work with marketing on persona-specific or theme-specific narratives, and contribute to product strategy content in your themes.
Leadership: You fundamentally understand our product strategy and vision, and you define how your product themes fit into that vision. Within a product theme you are perceived as being synonymous with the market need. You spread enthusiasm and market thinking across engineering and technical sales. You mentor more junior (and newer) product managers in the processes and methods used at Periscope Data.
Accountability: You are responsible for multiple product themes for Periscope, and you own enablement for your themes as well as feature delivery. You lead sales, support, and SE briefings on your product themes and you ensure that documentation, marketing materials and collateral that touch on your themes are accurate and consistent.
Staff PM
Hard skills: You have the experience to take top-to-bottom accountability for product managing an entire product – vision, market fit, strategy, roadmap, features, mvp, narrative, competitive analysis, enablement, and measurement. When working with leadership you present proposed decisions for approval, and talk about tradeoffs rather than expounding on details. Data and rationales are always at your fingertips. You know an immeasurable amount about your market, and are constantly tracking what competitors are up to in their products. You own the internal roadmap for your product and you write the external roadmap that is shared with customers.
You are deeply connected to what the engineering teams are building. Experience in delivering product has made you efficient rather than distant, and you are on top of each iteration and have an opinion on every bug and tradeoff.
You’re responsible for producing all the content required for the product management process – from market requirements through product plan. You contribute to GTM and sales strategy, help build sales decks, partner with engineering architecture to make the tough implementation tradeoffs. You pitch new product initiatives for your product with the leadership team, and report on your product KPIs. Reporting on customer usage is second nature and you can identify when an initiative or the whole product needs a strategy reset.
Cross-functionality: You spend a significant fraction of your time meeting with stakeholders and contributors to your product across the company. You have an inherent understanding of how to engage with people managers when advocating for resources, and you lead by influence and reputation.
Leadership: You are synonymous with your product across the organization. You mentor more junior product managers, and help new hires in other departments learn how to engage with product management. You are a capable presenter and speak at public events about your product.
Accountability: You own the strategy for your product, and you are responsible for getting it implemented and delivering on its KPIs. You are accountable for ensuring that your product strategy fits into the company strategy and vision.
The progression on each of our four measurement criteria is visible in these three examples. As ICs progress, they have familiar categories to be measured against, but the scope and scale of the measurement changes at each level, appropriate to the breadth of the role.
Your approach doesn’t have to stick to the four attributes above – you probably have your own criteria that’s a better fit for your team. Regardless, I hope you consider adopting a dual-track career ladder. It’s high time we leave the legacy of up-or-out management behind and focus on what’s best for our teams.
By focusing on what makes product managers successful, organizations can create clear paths for advancement without the unnecessary pressure to manage others. This approach not only enhances product development but also allows managers to thrive in roles that align with their strengths, and improves quality of life for everyone!
Reality-Based Product Management 