Lenny DistilledCraft → Career Growth
I've actually never seen a great PM who's in the center of it. I find the great PMs live on the edges. There's always someone who's this exceptional data scientist and the ability to maybe be a great GM and lead and inspire, or maybe someone who's so creative, who can lead a team in a different way.
I think the first thing is essentially raw sharps, and that can manifest itself into problem identification and problem solving. The second one is what I call drive or grit. Third, which is a little difference, we talked about that, is influence.
Everyone can learn how to be a versatile kind of unicorn product engineer/designer hybrid in the AI-native era. The only thing stopping you is just going out and doing it.
It's not a role, it's a career being in product and, really, there's so many things to learn and so many things to get good at.
I created a career growth framework for product managers, which comprises of three things. What you produce, what you bring to the table, and what's your operating model.
My recommendation is that you pick between data and tech one, and definitely one on design and research and strategy. My advice is if you're coming from design and research background, then you pick data or tech. If you're coming from a data or tech background, then you pick design and research.
To grow beyond entry level PM, domain expertise can take you a little further, but ultimately to have the highest trajectory, you have to lean into those founder skills - being a great storyteller, getting the most out of people around you, making really hard high conviction decisions that can't be solved analytically.
Do a legitimate side hustle, found a company on the side and learn everything else. You forget what it means to sell something to a customer, support a product, ship something and get destroyed because it doesn't work.
I have to think of my career as a little bit like a bingo card. I've always been looking to fill in boxes I didn't have filled because I felt like that would make me a better professional.
I've rarely regretted going deep in something that isn't quite my job. The worst case scenario is I've learned something new that I will never use. But the very best case scenario is that when I least suspect it at some point in the future it will turn out to be the thing that matters.
I think breadth is incredibly important. It's so critical, especially if someone has an end goal of wanting to step into a product leadership role to have been able to have touched lots of different components, as opposed to specializing in one specific thing.
I think it's really important to become really good at and also known for something. You could be known for shepherding like the most complex launches because you're just so good at quarterbacking. Find something that you can be really, really good at.
People tend to flock and give responsibility to the people that are known for being excellent at something.
The role of the chief product officer is so broad. You're not just the head of products. They need to have a business thinking. They need to understand their go-to market strategy. They need to understand the sales play. They need to understand how engineering are building products.
The folks who have successfully transferred over, they tend to have a couple of characteristics. They're usually very curious, they tend to be really passionate about the product and solving customer problems. And sometimes, they've even tinkered with a side project as a way to hone their PM skills.
I think product managers are increasingly I think a bit more technical or expected to be. I think there was a moment where they were technical and then it was, 'No, no, we're all generalists,' and now I think we're going back to PMs need to be more technical. I think designers, the expectation is that they'll be more business-oriented, design as a means, honestly, to an end. And I think engineers are increasingly becoming what more product-focused, more user-focused.
You need to have some breadth, right, but it's like same problem, different industry. It's one way to think about depth that's focused. Different problem, same industry is another way to think about it.
The mistake that I see a lot of product managers make is they start operating in either output or outcomes. And when you are transitioning to outcomes, it's very important that you continue to still hone your craft on outputs.