The BIG jump 🦘

As a PM, we have an often hard to understand career path. Companies try to ‘regulate’ this path, providing structure, levels, and associated expectation. What appears to be linear isn’t so linear in my experience. There are some jumps (and bumps) along the way.

The PM career is anything but a linear experience 🎢

Having been an individual contributor (IC) I am mostly concerned with what I call ‘trajectory 1 skills’. These skills explain success in the IC part of the PM career. If you start in a bigger company, there will be some progression, and you likely start with a role where you need to demonstrate mostly execution skills. This can be frustrating if you come from a strong entrepreneurial background, and wonder why you are asked to write these documents or present those slides. Not everyone is as keen on doing trajectory 1 work, especially if they feel it is preventing them from doing what is more valuable, i.e. making ‘bigger decisions’ on resource allocation or the product area to invest in.

As an IC PM, you can mainly focus on the execution skills, and doing a job really well. This can be extremely satisfying, and PMs can be IC PMs for their whole career. Once you are on the hook for more organizational goals, and are evaluated against them, this dynamic might shift. You might find yourself on the ‘trajectory 2’ part of the PM career.

At Google there are a set of levels to rank PMs by seniority. Most companies out there have such levels. The bottom half is considered IC, the top half is considered more managerial in nature (with some exceptions). I am not in HR, but here is how I think about the way they relate to one another.

Many PMs breeze through the lower PM levels. This is because they are reviewed and rated largely based on what you learn: delivery and execution. With some excellence, and some impact, of course. But mainly execution. In other words, if you work on something less impactful, no worries, just articulate that you worked on it really really well.

There is a jump about half way through. I call it ‘the BIG JUMP’, largely because I haven’t taken it yet. I am intimidated by it, and that is because there is a change in skills required that seems to be more significant than the rest of the ladder progressions. what do I mean? Let me visualize.

As you can see, conceptually, levels 3 (the associate PM level at Google) through to 5 are the levels where skills grow in depth, and the skill groups largely stay the same. I call the career growth from L3 to L5 ‘trajectory 1’. You get better at what you are doing already and expand those skills. On that trajectory, the increase in impact comes from doing more complex projects of higher complexity. Going from 5 to 6 is a different story. Not the same thing at all.

The skillset needed to be successful on trajectory 2 is fundamentally different 🤯

What is different is that the skills you had so far are necessary but not sufficient anymore on the next level. The skillset makes a fundamental shift. If you continue to deepen what you have done as an L5, it will likely not make you an effective level 6 PM. I have been a L6 PM for a while now. One thing I can say is that I kept hanging on to my lovely lovely L5 skills. I truly did. It did take a long time for me to be able to understand what was not working. So the last year I spent extra effort investigating the skills to grow as an L6. What kept you growing reaches a natural cap. You can’t increase project size and complexity forever. You are asked to perform differently.

One area for me that I had to learn was a massive factor as an L6 is managing organizational complexity. Understanding what the organization around you is interested in, and connecting areas of work to those goals is a key aspect of a good L6 PM. This is really hard to do. It requires to stay in touch and connected to what the org cares about, derive goals from this, and translate these goals in decision criteria by which one can filter areas of product work. When this is done well, areas of new scope are revealing itself and become a place in which new products and features can be built in.

At L6, scaling does not happen through more ownership of scope anymore. Instead, new areas need to be unlocked, and a strategy for those areas need to be conceived. Then, the PM needs to find and secure funding for those areas. This can be through getting people excited, but also through formal funding proposals and pitches to leadership. Use these hacks for scaling as a PM when you have to be scrappy in securing resources.

Handling communication and visibility of the work. What used to be done by my manager now needs to be done by me. Providing communication outward about the work we are doing. Finding allies across different teams. Enlisting their support and securing resources.

Another area is to proactively identify areas of investment for the group. As an L5 PM, you can rely on your manager and skip level to mainly determine this. As a senior PM, they will ask you what to do, and they will demand a plan. This might cause some considerable anxiety. What do you think we should do and why? It can be intimidating, especially if the area has a lot of uncertainty. It requires a lot of knowledge to lead a team into a new territory and have a reasonable chance for success. But this is exactly the place folks want you to go.

Pitfalls when moving from IC to Senior PM

When you move into the senior realm, there are some pitfalls that can happen.

• Holding on to previous behavior in challenging moments early after the transition
  It is normal to ‘fall back into’ our past behavior when we don’t see success with the new type of work we are asked to do. After a long time as a successful IC, making failures again will feel foreign. It will trigger a desire to move back to a place of comfort and competence. Unfortunately, this will likely drive us to behavior which made us a good IC, but might not help with the tasks at hand.
  
• Trying to buy time for difficult tasks
  One effective way to mitigate risk is to take more time to understand the lay of the land. ‘Making a plan to make a plan’ is a way to delay having to make decisions which might be wrong due to a large amount of uncertainty. As you become more senior, leads will ask of you to bring a plan, and accept the uncertainty.
  
• Measure first and make decisions later
  This can be challenging, as it is asking leads to wait longer for your input and perspective. This is not how orgs can ‘move fast’, and often it is perceived as a way to stall progress under uncertainty. If you want to be perceived as a senior leader, you will need to do both: bring a plan, start measuring and executing at the same time.

Prepare to manage other PMs 🙏

I think that managing others comes with the ask to define what to work on. Because it forces to develop a deep sense of scope and complexity and resource needs. I found this part always most intimidating. If I have to convince others this is worth working on, making it part of their career, that would put additional pressure on me to ensure this was truly so.

Start mentoring, look for interested folks in your team who show talent as potential PMs and grab their time and resource to support your cause. Rally people behind your vision in an effort to enable them to understand your goal and take action toward it. Don’t wait for permission, do what you can to act as a team lead, provide a vision and goal (and identity) for the team, and drive toward your goal completion.

There are some proven strategies to deal with this transition

As an L6 PM your manager remains a valuable source of input. But in my view they are less married to your success. You are much more self responsible. So how can you ensure success, and minute risk? You will need to find folks that you can recruit to be invested in your success. In the world out there this is often called an ‘advisory board’. The AB helps startups and leaders make better decisions, reduce risk, and maximize the chance for success. As a PM, look for curating such an advisory board. Enlist their support by giving them frequent updates on the plans and progress, risks identified, and how you plan to mitigate.

Understand what problems you like to work on, and which ones you are more inclined to avoid. Use this as a way to understand your ‘gaps’. Develop strategies to fill those gaps through developing additional skills, and practice them, as well as enlisting others to give you feedback.

Make sure others understand where you are and what you are trying to do. Your management chain, your team, as well as peers are the most crucial source for your development. Reach out to them and ask them for support and feedback in your development journey.

Read books and learn from others. I love the book ‘The first 90 days‘ as it is a great book summarizing the theory as well as giving practical advise for folks going through this transition. I am currently re-reading it, and doing all the assignments in the book. Also, the book ‘What got you here won’t get you there’ is a great read on the topic.

Take Action 🎬

📅 If you ever have any questions, feel free to book time with me for a quick PM consultation session.

📚 The book What got you here wont get you there is a great resource for the concepts which enable us to progress into leadership, and also to identify what can stand in our way. Marshall did an amazing job outlining the basic principles, and it helped me a great deal to articulate a strategy for my own ‘big jump’.

📚 The classic work by Dale Carnegie called How to win friends and influence people was a real game changer for me. It showed me how to deal with people, in all their facets, and gave me a newly found appreciation for the human factor in leadership. Invaluable for the necessary negotiation skills on the higher levels as a PM.

🦉 Consider upleveling your skills by taking the Product Management for AI/ML course from expert PMs on how to become a PM for AI/ML companies.