 Hmm. What's the highest you can climb as a product manager? Director product, VP of product, or COO? You can choose. Product manager has become one of the hottest jobs recently. But what's the career path of a product manager? How to get promoted after you become a product manager to become a VP or director product? What are the difference roles and responsibilities between individual contributor and director product? And what are the differences between the big companies like Google and Amazon and also the smaller companies like startup? Today, I'm going to solve all your confusions and help you to decide if product management is the right career path for you. This is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product from drnancy.com. I help people transition from worker B to a product manager and business leader. To learn the most effective way to land a product manager job, you should check out this video and subscribe and hit the bell button so that you'll be notified every time I publish a new video every Wednesday. If you like the content I provide today, please make sure you hit the like button so that I have motivation to make more content like this. Recently, my student got offers from 8 p.m. to senior p.m. all the way up to senior director product manager position. So therefore, I had the first hand behind the scene secret and tell you using the real-life example, what are the differences and different career paths of product management? First of all, the entry level position of being a product manager is called 8 p.m. associate product manager and some companies call it product analyst and some companies direct to give you a product manager title even if you are the very entry level. And when you are entry level product manager, you are mainly responsible for doing market research and helping product managers to make decisions and sometimes will also interview customers. But you are not going to be responsible for product, but you might be responsible for a specific product feature. And something I want to remind you is that the title of entry level product manager is very different depends on the type of companies you join. For example, Amazon will give you a product manager title immediately once you join the company, even if you have zero product management experience. In their level is called level five product manager. However, level five product manager in Amazon is the equivalent of 8 p.m. in Google and also the RPM in Facebook. Once you become the entry level product manager, you need to think about how could you get promoted. If you stuck in your position for two years or sometimes over three years, it's still not getting promoted to the advanced level. You need to think about what's going wrong in your promotion strategy. You should check out this video about how to get promoted to advance in the product management space. The next level of product management is getting promoted to be a senior product manager. Once you become a senior product manager, your roles and responsibilities will become bigger. For example, we will start to lead a team of engineers and designers to build your own product and on top of that will be responsible for the entire product success. However, in different companies, they give you different title. For example, in Amazon, you get a title as a senior product manager. However, in Google, we are called PM123, as we can see in this table. In Facebook, they don't even give you a senior product manager title. All they give you is product manager, but your levels will vary significantly. In Facebook, the same product manager title can have the level from level four all the way to level seven. In general, Facebook and Google gives you a relatively lower title. However, when you interview in those companies, you know that you should expect to have a downgrade of your title, but increase of your salary. So you can check out the details of different levels of salary in different fan companies. By this video right here, I give you a very detailed description based on years of experience. And in general, Amazon gives you a higher title. For example, the principal product manager in Amazon is equivalent of a senior product manager in Google. So it's really varied. So therefore I recommend you looking into the salary band compared with specific title. When you are a senior product manager, your roles and responsibilities start to grow significantly. You will be fully responsible for a single product and you start to do customer interviews, lead a team of senior engineers and try to build a product on top of that and also associate your idea and sell your vision to the stakeholders. So I have a question for you. Let me know what's your career aspiration? Do you want to be an individual contributor in a big fan company or you want to continue to be promoted into a director or VP of product position or you just want to try out some startup for fun? So comment down below and let me know your career aspiration as well. The next level of product management is a group product manager title. Once you become a group product manager, you will start to manage a team of product managers and you start to mentor entry level product managers and it's likely you will be responsible for a portfolio or product and sometimes it may not be a full portfolio, sometimes it could be a very complicated product platform that individual contributors, those product managers will be responsible for one individual feature but they're all connected into a platform and you as a group product manager, you manage the entire platform plus the people managing the individual components of it. And as a group product manager, you will start to learn all the people skills, start to manage not just product but more people, coaching people, help them to grow and spend more time to do stakeholder management and to be honest, more politics as well. Now all the companies give you a group product manager title and for example, in Google, the group product manager is the equivalent of a director or product in Amazon. So in Amazon, there's no group product manager title. However, in Facebook, they still call you a product manager but you can be paid the same level as a director product in Amazon. So really think hard about your salary, where you apply for these positions. The next level of product management is the director product or all the way up to the VP of product. Once you reach the exact level, your decision-making power and roles responsibilities will expand significantly. First of all, your decision-making power will be like five times bigger, sometimes it can be 10 times bigger. On top of that, you will start to manage multiple teams of product managers and you will be managing a full portfolio of product. On top of that, you'll also spend more time dealing with stakeholders, manage up and more politics behind the scenes to be honest. And you will be a little bit further away from customers because individual contributors, product managers will directly interview customers for you. You will be there to see the strategic vision and see something like more further out, two years, sometimes five years down the road. And on top of that, once you become a director product or VP of product, your entire scope of roles and responsibilities can also branch into different functions. For example, you can start to manage per marketing team and start to manage like pre-sale or customer success on top of prime management. As you grow senior, you might start to manage more operation type roles. So therefore, the next next level after director VP of product is the CEO or Chief Operating Officer. So therefore, I think the product management role in general can lead to many different branch of different kind of diverse of career paths after you advance into a director product position. Now let's talk about startups. To be honest, startup has no specific career paths, but in general startup has like product management level, which is entry level, all the way to director or VP. And in general, startups give you a higher title. Their title are inflated. For example, direct product in a startup to be an individual contributor, which is the equivalent of a senior product manager in bigger companies. However, those startups' career paths can really go to very different directions. And you can accelerate your career by working a startup for like four years or sometimes two years and three years, which is the equivalent working for like big company for five years, six years, because you do more things, you get exposure to many different functionalities in a startup. So therefore, I always recommend my students to check how startups as one of the alternative paths to get into product management as well. To me, I think it's much more fun and could be a raffle ticket. You never know, you might hit the next TikTok. Speaking of TikTok, one of my students got an offer from TikTok as a product manager and there's only about 10 plus product managers of TikTok in the US as well. So I'm very proud to tell you guys we're part of the TikTok family. I'm going to do a TikTok dance later on. So if you want to know more insider tips about product management career paths and how to become a product manager, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter. And I will also give you some exclusive referrals in those top companies in my career newsletter. And I also remind all of you guys to check out other videos right here and subscribe to my YouTube channel. Make sure to like this. All of you guys say that my content is like golden nugget. You said, based on the quality of my content, my YouTube channel should be 10 times bigger than where I am right now. In that case, I need your help to spread the word. So please let people know, comment, like and share my content. I'm looking forward to see you next time. All right, good luck with your PM journey. Bye.