 Hey, everyone. I'm Ganesh, a director of product management at Google. So thanks for joining me in this webinar today on growing as a PM in the post of your career, illustrated by yours, Julie. So I'm pretty excited to talk to you about this topic. It's a great topic, so let's just get into it. Now, I need to take a moment and acknowledge that product management is still a relatively new profession. Even as close as 10 years ago, people didn't really know what PMs were, what they did. And there are a diverse set of entry points into a PM career. So what you do every day can vary because teams and products and companies. So all this is to say that there's no real one great recipe to make a product manager. You're gonna have to experiment, try working with different teams, skills and styles over the course of your career and actually encourage you to move around and try a few different opportunities. You will find your fit. You're gonna also encounter what I call transition points in your career, where you'll hit natural scaling limits and just doing more of what you did before won't really give you room to grow. So we'll talk about that a bit later. But if you approach all of this with a growth mindset and you practice and learn new skills, then you create this room for yourself to scale. So what does growth for PMs actually look like? One myth I think we should bust right at the start is that your career is not gonna be a straight line up until the right, as much as we want it to be. There are gonna be times where you burn hard into a new phase of your career and you actually need to underperform for a while, while you learn new skills and how to scale yourself. So the hyper growth economies that we pretty much all live in has brought us to think about growth in terms of power and influence, more money or more seniority and status. And these are not inherently bad things to want. They'll probably happen over the course of your career, but you may not always unlock the fulfillment you're looking for by just bulldozing through the career ladder. And you actually run a real risk of burnout, which we'll talk about as well. So I think about growth as three pillars that you need to invest in equally. Number one, skills, literally what can you do? Over the course of your career, you need to learn and master sets of hard and soft skills, which allow you to take on more scope and complexity. And you wanna develop complimentary sets of skills at each stage of your career. Number two is accountability. What are you responsible for delivering? At different stages of your career, you're accountable for delivering different outcomes. So PMing is all about influence, so it's important to note the difference between being personally accountable for delivering something and needing to influence an accountable party. And I'll get into that in a little while. The third is sustainability. So how do you actually balance your time and energy on the right things? This is everything from work-life balance to meeting load, tactical to strategic work. Great PMs are really masters of balance. And while this is a people-focused job, it can actually be really isolating at time. So you have to have a long and fulfilling career, learn how to take stock, measure and sustain your performance over time. So ultimately, product management is about leadership. But the type of skills you deploy and the leadership you demonstrate over the stages of your career are different. So let's take a closer look at how this evolves. This is a framework that I use to describe how a PM's accountability changes over the course of their career. Let me just explain this chart a little bit. You can think of the green as the areas you're expected to deliver and the blue is the things you need to influence. So you can see immediately that all PMs at all stages of their career own and influence a variety of work. But it's this balance that changes between what you own and what you need to influence. So I like to think of PM skills growth over the course of a career using this model of cumulative skill development where the skills you develop at each layer helps lay the foundation for the next. And that means as you grow in seniority, you can flex and provide support where needed or use your understanding of these core skills to help develop the next generation of PMs. So as I mentioned, the type of leadership you demonstrate and the skills you master and deploy at each stage are different. Such what digging into and understanding what makes PMs most effective at each stage. This is what I describe as growing from being a product leader early in your career to a strategic leader mid-career and to an organizational leader later in your career. Not everyone goes to every stage depending on the company you're in. I'm purposely not talking about things like years of experience or levels because I think these vary a lot based on your route or where you work. Generally speaking, this is the growth path. So let's explore these in more detail. All right, early in your career, the PM job is all about product leadership. You often find yourself on a small single product team. You own a set of features, a specific user base, or a problem to solve. So back when I first started my career at Google, I was a PM for a Google Drive on Android, a very small team, couple of engineers, a designer supporting the full product all 100% of the time. And my mandate was to take what we knew within early cloud customers on mobile and just expand user adoption and happiness. This is a very standard example of what an early career problem looks like, relatively well-skilled problem, general direction to go in. Ultimately, all PMs at every point in that career are judged by their ability to execute and just get things done. This is why the first set of skills you learn when starting as a PM are how to get things done. So mastering and getting things done at a small scale, you then have the foundation for knowing why you are or aren't getting things done at any applicable scale after that. So let's talk a little bit about the skills you need at this stage. So split these between hard and soft skills, but they're very complementary. On the hard skills side, you wanna be able to analyze data, user feedback, research, and then provide some perspectives. You wanna define critical user journeys, success metrics. You need to be able to articulate more than one option for solutions to problems. Designing MVPs is really important. You need to create visions and roadmaps that you can share. And then you're gonna be defining goals for a team, typically in the form of things like quarterly or chaos. So kind of short term. On the soft skills side to compliment these, you're gonna be doing a lot of relationship building with your peers. You're trying to form that mind meld with your engineering or design peers. You're gonna get really a lot of practice at telling a product narrative and that's gonna compliment your vision deck. You'll start working on incorporating feedback into work. I always say share, work early, and then you wanna actually get really good at listening to what people say and learning how to incorporate it. And then communicating just the status and plans of your team, build more visibility into what they're doing. Finally, you're gonna start investing in team culture. At this stage, it's probably things like ensuring there's like some team health going on. There's might be standups or retrospectives or just even just celebrating the moments where you succeed or fail. So coming back to the latter, the early stage of PM career focuses primarily on what you can see as these bottom two layers of accountability. And a PM success at this stage is primarily driven by the ability to get stuff done. So as you grow over the stage of your career, you'll likely pick up larger responsibilities and you will grow by start leading multiple teams. The reward for PMs who do good work is often more work. So this is why the next stage of development is team effectiveness. In order to continue to scale, you need to learn how to keep a team effective even if you're not able to be in every meeting or decision point with them. Once you're leading across a larger team or many teams, the relationships you have with the specialists matters a lot because you're gonna have to dip in and out of these teams at critical points to deliver on execution outcomes. So this takes you into the mid-career stage. Many PMs at this point find themselves leading several loosely connected projects and at the limit of their personal capacity to execute on each one. So there's a key pivot point here. In order to have more impact, you can't really just keep executing. At this point, you're probably very good at getting stuff done given the right resources and direction to head it. So thinking back to my career at this point, I was leading across multiple internal teams building productivity applications for Google employees. So very much an enterprise focus, but I was working on a range of different products at different stages. So it became really important to balance my time and be able to articulate the opportunity cost of doing X versus Y given our current resourcing. So the nature of the job actually shifts. Learning more impact becomes more about how you coordinate between disparate teams towards a common goal. Or in larger organizations, it's about how you influence outside your area of control, convince other teams that are not a part of the company to work with you on a common goal. So yes, we're actually talking about product strategy here where a higher order understanding of the why and how needs to be expressed so a PM can influence both inside and outside the domain to get teams to band together. Sometimes this takes the form of ramping down existing efforts or pitching for new funding, resourcing and bringing folks onto the team. So let's talk a little bit about the skills you need at this stage. On the hard skills side, there is obviously building product strategy. If you have the time and inclination, I highly recommend a book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. It goes into a lot of detail, it's just excellent. And then once you have a strategy, you need to actually take it and connect it to priorities. Then you need to define what I call guiding metrics. These are higher level metrics than just a teams metrics that actually you can measure them to see if you're succeeding in your strategy and they tend to pull teams together. You're then going to start working on probably things that are more complex, roadmaps that are involved, things like migration or deprecation or prototyping. So you may have multiple teams, different maturity levels, and you're going to kind of flex how you think about roadmaps to suit where they are. You're going to start creating like longer term goals, maybe like one year out. These are more strategic in nature. They might be annual, they might cover a range of teams. They may be shared between teams too. Then on the soft skills side, you're probably going to need to be really good at designing and facilitating workshops. I'm talking about doing summits or sprints. Design sprints are an excellent resource. You may have actually done a couple of these as a more junior PM, but at this point, this should be like tools you have in your toolbox. You know how to deploy really well. You can identify when a team needs one and you can go and get it done. Then the interesting thing about leading across teams is that you immediately can tell the difference between a higher performing and a lower performing team. So part of your job starts becoming looking into why teams are lower performing and then how to actually get them out of that mode. You're going to manage a much more complex list of stakeholders, probably in and around you and the organization. And so that also involves getting really good at communicating succinctly up and outward in ways that make sense to them. And then finally, you may be starting to become a people manager here. It's not required, but what you will do is actually starting to attract and retain talent onto your team. So even take this as an example, your engineering lead might come to you and say, hey, for this project, I'm really trying to attract this key engineer. I think they're really great. Can you please convince them of this project? And so that actually becomes part of the job. You start practicing it with other roles too. Eventually you're going to be starting to hire your own PMs onto the team as you become more senior yourself. So coming back to the latter, this mid-create stage of PM is all about making this lead from tactical strategic ownership. So it's no longer sufficient to just get things done. Over this period in your career, you'll go from being accountable for delivering product strategy to supporting the team through hiring and retention. And then finally, taking this wider organizational view across all resourcing and priorities. Keep in mind that this will likely span a much longer period of time than before due to the amount of effort it takes to actually define a strategy, shift priorities, then deliver by execution. So at this time stage, you should be constantly seeking to understand the opportunity cost of executing against current priorities versus potential strategic opportunities and learn how to define and communicate this opportunity cost to both the team and stakeholders. So then once a strategy is selected, the challenge becomes, how do you align the organization? Which may have been working on different priorities to deliver against this strategy. All the skills you master in execution and building effective teams come back to bear here. Now you can't possibly be everywhere at once. So you'll be balancing your time between teams to help set their direction and then you might step into the day-to-day execution only when necessary to unblock another performing team or create a new one. This is a really hard transition to master. I can't overstate this. Take some time and take some patience. As this is the first time, though definitely not the last time in your career where you have to actually avoid all the things people love you for and you can't do the work you were doing previously. And instead you got to teach your peers or junior PMs to influence you influence to start driving execution outcomes themselves. So assuming you do this successfully, you're starting to push into demands of like a later stage PM career. And here's where you're going to be leading larger organizations. To ballpark this, I'm going to say it's about like an organization of 100 plus people. That's just an average. I'm saying that because it's when you actually encounter problems that you get when you manage many different job functions. There's many layers of hierarchy to organize those people between you and the team's focus on execution. And so at this stage, many product managers find themselves managing managers. And while it's actually very possible to be an individual contributor, you're still going to play a really important role shaping the standards and best practices for PMs across your organizational company. So you're a leader no matter what. At this point, you've proved your ability to set strategy at the level of probably a single product line. And you're now stretching to define the purpose at the company level. What's the purpose of your organization? Which may involve many product lines at varying levels of maturity. So the nature of your job shifts again and you'll be spending the bulk of your time with senior leaders in your company helping align across a variety of domains. In this part of your career, you're going to take a much broader view and align your organization's purpose to the company's success. And this may involve managing major commitments to key clients or even restructuring to shut down or merge teams that are not delivering with strategic projects. So building on the skills you develop for product strategy, you'll need to think into the even longer term, something like two to five years, which will mean articulating an opinionated view on how your organization needs to transform over that time to deliver value to the company. So again, you're stepping away from the things you did really well during your mid-career, which were often focused on being a highly effective manager or a strategic leader. Now your focus will be creating purpose and getting the organization to align around a strategy and deliver. So let's talk about the skills you need at this stage. I've already talked about purpose. It's really important to kind of think about why is there a team of this size at this point in time? What can you uniquely deliver that nobody else can? Then you're going to spend a lot of your time doing actual hiring, thinking about retention, thinking about organizational health. You'll be defining the organizational structure. Like you'll actually be building layers of senior leaders and teams and trying to think about how do you make them complementary with each other. You're going to be connecting the actual business priorities of the company to strategy and resourcing. And that means you're going to be spending time getting out of your bubble, understanding emerging customer needs and even industry trends, because you need to know whether you're about to get disrupted or you should continue to execute your own path you're on. You'll spend a lot of your time doing decision-making and approvals, right? You're running a fairly large organization at this point. So people will be coming to you to like approve things. And so setting up good processes to handle this is really important. And then on the soft skill side, a large part of the job actually becomes people management directly or coaching. You're actually going to be growing senior leaders. So you need to think about this yourself. You'll be defining what a healthy culture actually looks like in your organization. This is beyond just like individual teams, including things like DEI and making sure that the organization is kind of supporting itself really well. You'll probably almost be leading through change. You need to think about change a lot because at an organization that side, there'll be teams that are in some state of flux and like being very good at knowing how to communicate change and land it with the team becomes really important. And you'll be providing air cover for your teams. You know, you want to be a good leader and you want to actually like help them change when they need to, but you also want them to have agency and go innovate as well. And so you'll have to decide where the line is and when to defend them from incoming escalations. And that gets to the last part. This is the sad news, but unfortunately at this point, you're in an organization that is large enough that you will always have overperforming underperforming teams, overperforming underperforming people. There'll be always be some sense of conflict. And so you'll actually have to be really good at mediation, resolving conflict, dealing with escalations, dealing with firefighting. So looking back at the career ladder, at this stage you're mastering how to transform organizations themselves, lead with purpose and scale senior leaders. PM leadership at this stage tends to become a little bit similar to other senior organizational leaders. So at many companies, you might actually become the single-threaded owner or start leading as a GM or a CTO, whether or not you manage people directly, you really will be a people leader. So you'll need to ensure that you can support the needs of many different functions within your organization, but actually deliver on business outcomes that you are accountable for. The buck pretty much stops at you at this point. So late career PM relationship is all about scale. And when you scale people, you get complexity. So there's no real guidebook behind this point as you're very much in charge of your own destiny. That doesn't mean you have it all figured out far from it, but it's the point where you pull together your cumulative mastery of skills that you built at earlier stages of your career. And it's the point where you master the most important scale of them all in my opinion, which is scaling yourself. So I've saved the best for last, I think ultimately growing as a product manager is all about actually being able to scale yourself. So we had contradiction of product management career is that it's at the same time, both a people focused job, but it's also quite a lonely role at times. PMs are by design very rarely allocated to the same team with same responsibilities. So it's considered best practices to give PMs clear scope and ownership so you can unlock their creativity and avoid friction. This effect only gets more pronounced and more senior you become in your career. As the teams you lead look to you to define purpose and help unblock them, but at the same time you're further away from their day-to-day team activities. So you kind of get more isolated in a way. Outside of these hard and soft skills it's important for PMs to learn to scale themselves. And that means as you progress in your career, you take the time to master skills at each stage instead of just blazing through and you minimize the amount of time and energy it takes you to solve particular problems. So you're actually creating this space for sustainable growth. So burnout in the PM role is actually a real risk. I don't think people talk about it enough. And as someone who's experienced work-induced burnout before I've learned a few lessons to help me scale at a pace that I consider sustainable. So number one, be aware of transition points in your career so you know when to seek growth. I've talked about a few of these points in this talk, but here are the most important ones in my mind. One, when you start moving from execution to strategy. The two, when you learn to influence across many different teams including ones where you're not actually the primary product manager. Number three, when you start managing product managers and then again to a lesser extent where you start managing managers or product managers both times your job changes. And number four, when you're actually transforming organizations and thinking about how to lead through change. Each of these stages represent a time in your career when you find that everything that got you to this point will not get you any further. And if you try to just do more of what you're doing you actually run that risk of burnout. It's important to know when you're one of these stages you take a step back, identify the skills and behaviors you need to develop. There's no doubt that you're actually gonna do a worse job for a period of time and you need to be okay with that. These are times of growth and if you don't allow yourself some space to experiment and fail, well, you just won't learn how to scale. So the second tip I have is to create space to intentionally reflect during times of the year. So at least once a year I would say create a period of reflection. You can ask yourself the following questions. One, am I learning something new or am I just implementing what I already know at a greater scale? But two, how can I reduce the amount of time and energy it takes me to drive a particular outcome and just focus on one? Number three is who's a good role model for the behavior I wish to learn? There's a piece of advice I got from a mentor on mine if you wanna go to the next level try and find someone who represents a really good role model at that level just observe what they do and more importantly observe what they don't do and then start to kind of match your behavior it'll kind of teach you where you should be investing your time. Number four, I'll hop on about this a lot but do you have a mentor that can help you grow? And that's really important like mentorship in every stage of your career is one of the best ways to kind of have somebody on your side kind of helping you grow try and find somebody who's close in you and seniority just maybe in the next stage of their career who's willing to spend some time with you to kind of objectively talk through where you are. So these are all questions you can ask and techniques you can use to step out of your day to day and check in to see if there's more you can be doing to grow. So the thing is, there really is kind of infinite room to grow. I mean, I'm more than a decade into my career as a PM I still have a lot to learn and I find that really exciting. Much of what I shared with you today is the wisdom of many great mentors and managers who've helped me on my journey and we're still kind of in early in defining what a PM career really looks like end to end. So we all get to be part of this journey and that's really fun. So I'd love to hear from you on how you think about growth in different stages of a PM career. So we can kind of broaden our collective understanding with more perspectives. So thanks for taking the time to join this webinar. I'd absolutely love to hear from you. So if you have any questions or feedback or comments on my wonderful illustrations, please find me on LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation there. Have a good one.