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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
        • Part II. The role of the product managr
          • Chapter 6. Bad product manager archetypes
          • Chapter 7. A great product manager
          • icon picker
            Chapter 8. The product manager career path
          • Chapter 9. Organising your teams
        • Part III. Strategy
          • Chapter 10. What is strategy?
          • Chapter 11. Strategic gaps
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
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Chapter 8. The product manager career path
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Chapter 8. The product manager career path

Associate Product Manager

The associate product manager role is the entry level position for a product manager. Yet, as I mentioned at the beginning of this part, there are not many of these roles available at companies besides Microsoft and Google. This is something we need to change in the industry. If companies want excellent product managers, they need to begin growing them.

Product Manager

The product manager works with a development team and UX designers to ideate and build the right solutions for the customers. They are the ones on the ground floor, talking to users, synthesizing the data, making the decisions from a feature perspective. Product managers are usually responsible for a feature or a set of features that are part of a larger packaged product.
The danger is when a product manager is 100% operational, focusing only on the process of shipping products and not on optimizing the feature from a holistic standpoint. When they only optimize for the day-to-day execution of the team, they usually fall behind in the strategy and visioning work that is needed for the success of the features. This is why it’s imperative to push back as much project management effort as possible to the team and trust them to deliver.
A lot of companies have added a product owner title, which includes with the same responsibilities we discussed in the previous chapter on this topic. They see this as an entry-level role preceding that of product manager. As I explained earlier, when you think of a product manager as looking at only strategy and of a product owner only looking at tactical, you miss the connection between the vision and the day-to-day work. This gets you into the aforementioned danger of having the product person be too tactical. When you try to advance on the career ladder, the product owner will not have the experience with strategy that is needed to be effective. I believe it’s best, as an industry, that we forgo product owner as a title and call everyone in this position a product manager so that there is a consistent and meaningful career path.

Senior Product Manager

A senior product manager is responsible for the same things as a product manager, but they oversee more scope or a more complex product. It is as high in the product management field as you can go as an individual contributor, meaning that they do not do people management.
This is the role for people who like difficult product problems. They want to work on new, innovative products and to chart new territory for the company. Their role is very similar to the architect role in development, which focuses more on laying the development structure and scaling it rather than managing other developers.

Director of Product

A director of product is usually found only at larger companies. The director of product is the first level of people management. They oversee a group of product managers who are aligned around a product in a portfolio or product line.

VP of Product

Next is a VP of product. Someone in this role oversees the strategy and operations for an entire product line. The VP of product is responsible for connecting the company goals back to the growth of their product line. With inputs from the people on their team and the data they provide, they set the vision and goals for the overall product. In large, enterprise companies, VPs of product are also directly responsible for the financial success of their product line, not just the delivery of product features.

Chief Product Officer

The CPO is a fairly new yet critical role for organizations. A CPO oversees a company’s entire product portfolio. This is the highest role of a product manager, and it represents a seat at the executive table of a company. The CPO is responsible for driving the economic success of the business through the growth of the product portfolio. Although a VP of product needs to understand how their product roadmap affects the economics of the company, a CPO needs to do that across all products. A CPO needs to be able to interface at the board level, as well.
Associate Product Manager
Product Manager
Senior Product Manager
Director of Product
VP of Product
Chief Product Officer
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