Product Management is a relatively new field so there can be ambiguity between the titles/roles and their associated responsibilities. For example, what does it really mean to be a Sr. Product Manager (PM) versus a Director of Product? Most Directors have direct reports, but is that the only real difference? If you are a PM looking to move up the career ladder, this confusion can have you scratching your head wondering what you need to know to advance your career.

In my experience, there seems to be limited guidance about what a PM needs to master in order to move up the ladder. Instead after a couple of years of experience in the current role, many people either advocate for a title change or move to another company hoping to advance their career that way.

Over the past year, I have been thinking more about the skills needed for the different PM roles¹. I want to share these thoughts² to try and create some clarity for PMs trying to advance their careers.

Let’s start with the Product Manager role. A person in this role is usually relatively new to Product Management. They are just learning how to solve business problems by working with Engineering and UX.

Mastery of this skill is a critical building block for any PM and the primary box that needs to be checked at this level. A Product Manager should be able to work independently with Engineering and UX to execute moderately complex projects successfully.

At the Sr. PM level, working with Engineering and UX to solve business problems should be second nature. You should be able to handle any problem independently no matter how complex. This doesn’t mean PM leadership isn't there to offer guidance as needed, but they are not in the mix with Engineering/UX.

As a Sr. PM, your learning shifts from solving the business problems to understanding and eventually leading the larger business context for your product. Building your product is only half the battle. Ensuring it is successful in the market is the other half.

For a product to be successful, a larger cross-functional team must be engaged to market, support, and sell the product. Sometimes working with these teams can be a challenge for a PM as they have differing viewpoints and priorities. For example, after months of hard work building the solution to a challenging problem, a PM is just super excited to launch. For the CX and Marketing teams, the hard work is now just beginning as they need to help launch and support this product. So, rightfully, they have lots of tough questions that maybe you haven’t thought about yet. To you, these might not seem that important. After all, you completed the hard part, which was solving the business problem. The rest should be like going downhill on a sled.

Given this, Product leadership will usually be there to plow the road ahead on occasion if there are some big snowdrifts. These are the skills you need to master though. Learning how to market, sell, and support your product by working with other cross-functional teams is the learning for this role. Until you have a firm grasp on the business fundamentals of your product, it is hard to move up.

Once you reach the Director level, you should now have a solid grasp of the business fundamentals of your product and have mastered solving complex business problems. You can work independently with cross-functional teams to get stuff done. This means you have learned how to handle trickier political situations and understand the levers of power with different cross-functional teams.

For the Director role, the learning is how to put pieces on the board. It is no longer about any one product, but a set of products or product line. You need to think about the strategy for the line and how the products work together to solve the larger business problem of your clients. Because of this, vision and strategy become very important at this level.

Once you have your vision and strategy aligned with your executive leadership, it is time to figure out what bets to make. While your executive team may have the final approval, it is your role to make the initial selections then champion or create the business cases needed for the formal green light.

Conversely, running a product line means you occasionally may have products that are not achieving their objectives. It is your role to work with the PM to figure out a new plan or pull the plug. This is part of thinking objectively about the products and how they contribute to the overall product line.

As a director, your time horizon also now shifts outward. Instead of thinking about your product roadmap 3 to 6 months out, you are focused on the next 6 months to a year. While features can be built in 3 months, it takes at least 6 months to build a new product or execute a strategy shift in a product line.

At this level, you are usually managing a team of PMs. I am a firm believer in spending significant time training your team. Most companies can’t attract and hire the very best talent. However, You should be able to find raw talent with a passion that can be molded into great PMs. Those team members are the ones that will ultimately create the products that achieve your overall strategy. How well you coach and lead your team will ultimately determine the success of their product line.

At the very top is the VP of Product. At this level, you are either putting entire product lines on the board or making big strategic bets. You should have a wide purview of the entire business and must determine where to invest resources. These are big strategic bets that affect the overall business 1+ years out and could require acquisitions to be successful. Most importantly, these strategic bets must be accompanied with decisions about where not to invest. All companies have scarce resources that must be invested wisely to achieve the strategic objectives.

Lastly, don’t forget coaching and mentoring of your team. Your Directors need just as much support as a Sr. PM. The only difference is the area of focus. Instead of coaching product execution, it is about business strategy and team leadership.

[1]: For the purposes of this post, I am calling it a role to remove the title from the discussion as companies can have different titles with similar responsibilities.

[2]: My mind and my opinions are steeped in the B2B or B2B2C world and may not reflect B2C roles.