Product Manager Career Paths Demystified
Background
Product manager career paths, like many other things about product management, vary widely from company to company. What I’m attempting to outline here is an average, if such a thing exists. I’ve seen this pattern repeated at many places and there are tons of exceptions. I think most people in the field will recognize the progression and agree it’s directionally correct. As you can see in Figure 1, I’m baselining this to a ~ 25 person product team at a $200M SaaS business. Smaller companies will see fewer layers in general, and you’ll see the title “Head of Product” pop up more often. Larger companies typically extend the progression I’ll show with extra “stops” along the way such as tucking Senior Director in between Director and Vice President or adding Group Product Manager between Senior Product Manager and Director.
Figure 1 - A Baseline for Career Progression
Starting Out
You can come from anywhere. I was hired into a role in Marketing in 2005, in a small consumer internet service division of Boeing and after two months my boss said “you’re a product manager now.” My response was “what is that?” One of my favorite interview questions is always “how did you find your way into product management?” Admittedly it’s not always super valuable in assessing the viability of the candidate, but I’m always amazed at the vast array of answers. As long as you’re starting out in an entry level role, you can jump in to product management from literally any background. There is no single path.
David Cancel wrote a pretty awesome article about this a few years back - he went as far as to say “I try not to hire people into Product Manager roles with prior product management experience.” Given the variability in product managers out there and my belief that personality and decision making also matter as much as PM experience, I agree with the basic sentiment, though don’t go as far as saying being a product manager should be an auto-DQ.
Figure 2 - Starting Out
You’ll see a lot of people who start out as developers and move over to product management after a few years, potentially after completing an MBA. Lots of people from many backgrounds jump in to product management from MBA programs, myself included. It’s also common for people from customer support, sales engineering, or professional services to join product because they know the product and the customers extremely well.
The key thing is you can jump in from outside into one of a few “entry level” product jobs fairly safely as you can see in Figure 2. Larger companies will typically have “Associate Product Manager” or “Product Analyst” positions that are effectively training roles. These are great as long as the company has a track record of bringing people in and grooming them up into full PM roles. Keep an eye out for places that are hiring for an Associate Product Manager title for budget reasons, because of title of existing employees, or some reason other than “we’re committed to having a training pipeline.”
Jumping in at Product Manager level is typically fine too, and it’s more common at larger companies for these to be people with more experience and possibly a grad degree. The only “don’t do” is jumping in from outside product at the Senior Product Manager level to start. While people certainly can learn the ropes quickly, Senior PM is a distinction that conveys mastery of the role. By definition no one showing up from the outside is at that level, regardless of how much experience they have.
Figure 3 - Moving Up
Moving Up to Management Positions
Once you’ve mastered the role and put some time in as an autonomous and highly effective individual contributor Senior Product Manager, there are a few forks in the road that are possible.
The “normal” path is to move up to Director, which typically comes with some people management responsibilities. I say normal for a few reasons. First, it’s the thing most Senior PMs are fixated on as their next stop. Second, Group Product Manager while certainly common is not something that exists at every company and therefore “Director” is often the role where you first get formal people management responsibility.
Group Product Manager exists in some larger organization as a cleaner way to say “Manager, Product Management.” You are able to pick up a direct report or two, and have more responsibility without everything that may come along with the Director title, especially in large organization.
Principal Product Manager is probably one of the most misused titles and least understood roles in the bunch. Where Director and Group PM take you towards people management and further progression into senior leadership of a large organization, Principal Product Managers are effectively extremely senior ICs. Many of them tried managing a team and either didn’t like it, or in more cases, missed doing the hands-on work that led them to become a product manager in the first place. The misuse comes from promoting people to this role because of they’ve been a Senior PM for a long time and HR needs an “event” to justify a pay increase or some reason other than this person wants to be an IC long term and is effectively a master craftsperson.
Principal Product Managers should be extremely rare in an organization. Finding good people, who have the experience to be a Principal and the sincere desire to focus on the work to be done as an IC is very hard. I think in my team of 20+ we had one. He was exceptional, was given a tremendous amount of responsibility and autonomy, and delivered amazing results. People do sometimes move back and forth between Principal and Director and that’s fine as they are effectively equivalent experience roles with and without people management responsibilities.
Continued movement upwards from these roles will typically land you at VP Product or “Head of Product” at smaller companies. The main distinguishing feature is being the senior most product leader in the company, usually working directly for the CEO or one of their direct reports.
Figure 4 - Long Term Career Possibilities
Long Term Possibilities
You can stay at VP Product level your entire career and get to see and do quite a lot. There is again, a surprising amount of variability of what VP Product means - you could be in charge of a 10 person team at $20M ARR venture-backed company or a 25+ person team at a $250M publicly traded company. The choice to continue beyond is a personal one. Do you want to move into larger roles at larger companies or potentially lead one? You can of course exit stage right and become a consultant that writes blog posts about PM career paths. :-)
In many cases Chief Product Officer (CPO) is starting to replace VP Product as the title for the senior most product person, and as the title implies they will almost always work directly for the CEO. They will likely have a few VPs working for them.
SVP Product seems to pop up at larger orgs where there has been additional stratification of the “VP” title. Sometimes it’s Executive Vice President, or “EVP.” It usually will come with a larger team and more responsibility. What you’re actually doing day to day is going to vary a ton by company. I can’t prove this with data, but I’ve seen this more at companies where Product and Engineering report to a single person who then reports to the CEO. The person who owns both orgs will typically be “SVP Product & Engineering” as CPO and CTO titles don’t fit.
Some product people chose to pop right out of the function altogether and either become the General Manager (GM) of a business unit at a large company (effectively CEO of a division) or CEO of full organization. This has definitely been less common path to GM and CEO until the last few years. As Product Management has grown in stature (and execution) within the last 5-ish years, the function has produced more leaders at this level.
Wrapping Up
Product Management is an awesome, challenging, and rewarding profession and the good news is, pretty much anyone can start as long as they are willing to put in the work to master the basics. The path to move up is a little different depending on circumstances and the size of company but typically follow the “average” progression I described above.
Having trouble navigating your course to the next role? Are you trying to design your org and normalize titles and responsibilities?
