Main Takeaways: Learn about the different stages of a PM career - Product, strategic, and organizational leadership. Understand where to drive vs influence outcomes and what skills matter at each career stage. Identify career transition points and learn how to navigate them successfully.

1. Growing as a PM in the Course of Your
Career by Google PM Director
productschool.com

2. Accelerate your Product Management Career
Certifications
Product Manager
Certification™
Product Leader
Certification™
productschool.com/online

3. Team Training
Level Up Your Team’s
Product Management Skills
productschool.com

4. Resources
Free Product Management Resources
Events Courses Podcasts
Newsletters Communities eBooks and
Reports
productschool.com/resources

5. Growing as a PM
in the course of
your career
Ganesh Shankar
linkedin.com/in/ganeshshankar

6. You’re going to have to
try different skills and
styles over the course
of your career.
There’s no one recipe
to making a great
product manager.
At transition points in
your career you will hit
your scaling limits.
But, with a growth
mindset and practice,
you’ll master skills and
create room to scale.
Growing as a PM is about the journey

7. What does growth look like?

8. Proprietary + Confidential
Career Trajectory
Expectation Reality
Seniority Seniority
Performance
Performance

9. Three pillars of growth
Skills Accountability Sustainability
What can you DO?
At each stage of your career,
think critically about the skills
that matter, and master them.
What are you responsible for
delivering?
PMs do a bit of everything, but
knowing where to own vs
influence outcomes is key to
mastering accountability.
How do you balance your
time and energy?
Good PMs work hard, great
PMs work smart. Growing in
your career is about scaling
yourself - and there’s only 1
you!

10. PM skills and leadership styles

11. Organisational Transformation
Scaling Leaders
Execution
Team Effectiveness
Hiring & Retention
Product Strategy
Organisational Strategy
Accountability over the course of your career
Early
Career
Late
Career
Own
vs
Influence

12. Proprietary + Confidential
Leadership style across PM career stages
1 | Early Career 2 | Mid Career 3 | Late Career
Product Leader
● Leading a single product team.
● Driving efficient execution
against a roadmap.
● Scaling team effectiveness.
Strategic Leader
● Leading across several product
teams (or a large team).
● Defining strategy to align teams
and make tradeoffs.
● Debugging team effectiveness
and resourcing needs.
Organisational Leader
● Leading an organisation,
product line or business unit.
● Defining purpose and culture.
● Leading through change.
● Building resilient teams.
● Transforming organisations.
● Allocating resources.

13. Soft Skills
Data, feedback, research analysis
Defining CUJs, success metrics
Articulating solution options
Designing an MVP
Creating vision and roadmaps
Defining team quarterly OKRs
Hard Skills
Early Career: Product Leader
Early in your career, the PM job is all about product
leadership, you often find yourself supporting a single
product team and owning a set of features, specific user
base or problem to solve.
You are accountable for:
● Execution against a given strategy or roadmap
● Team Effectiveness through providing day-to-day PM
support
Relationship building with peers
Telling a product narrative
Incorporating feedback into work
Communicating status and plans
Investing in team culture

14. Proprietary + Confidential
Early
Career
Late
Career
Organisational Transformation
Scaling Leaders
Execution
Team Effectiveness
Hiring & Retention
Product Strategy
Organisational Strategy
Own
vs
Influence
Early Career Accountability

15. Soft Skills
Defining a Product Strategy
Connecting strategy to priorities
Defining guiding metrics
Complex roadmaps (e.g.
migrations and/or prototyping)
Creating strategic OKRs (annual,
shared)
Hard Skills
Mid Career: Strategic Leader
At the mid-career stage, many PMs will find themselves
leading several loosely connected projects and at the
limit of their personal capacity to execute.
You are accountable for:
● Setting strategic direction and advocating to gain and
keep resourcing
● Coordinating across multiple teams (including partner
teams) to ensure delivery against your strategy
● Client and stakeholder engagement
Transition point:
Think strategically… instead of just executing more,
coordinate and collaborate to drive more impact.
Designing / facilitating workshops
Debugging low performing teams
Managing stakeholders
Communicating up and outward
Attracting and retaining talent
Motivating and aligning teams

16. Proprietary + Confidential
Early
Career
Late
Career
Organisational Transformation
Scaling Leaders
Execution
Team Effectiveness
Hiring & Retention
Product Strategy
Organisational Strategy
Own
vs
Influence
Mid Career Accountability

17. Defining a Purpose for your
organisation
Hiring, retention and org health
Defining organisational structure
Connecting business priorities to
strategy and resourcing
Understanding customer needs
and industry trends
Decision making and approvals
People management / coaching
Defining a healthy culture
Leading through change
Providing air cover for your teams
Resolving conflict
Firefighting
Soft Skills
Hard Skills
Late Career: Organisational
Leader
At the later stage of a PM career, you are likely to lead
large organisations. Many PMs will find themselves
managing managers or playing an important role in
setting business priorities.
You are accountable for:
● Defining the purpose of your organisation.
● Setting culture and ensuring org effectiveness.
● Allocating resources across priorities.
● Identifying and leading through transformative
changes.
Transition point:
Define purpose… instead of focusing on maximum impact
with a fixed capacity, consider organisational transformation.

18. Proprietary + Confidential
Early
Career
Late
Career
Organisational Transformation
Scaling Leaders
Execution
Team Effectiveness
Hiring & Retention
Product Strategy
Organisational Strategy
Own
vs
Influence
Late Career Accountability

19. Scaling yourself

20. Scaling Yourself
Be aware of transition points in your career:
● Execution to Strategy
● Influencing across teams
● People management
● Transforming organizations
Ask yourself from time to time:
● Am I learning something new or implementing what I know at a
greater scale?
● How I reduce the amount of energy and effort required to drive
a particular outcome?
● Who is a good role model for behaviour I wish to learn?
● Do I have a mentor that can help me grow?

21. linkedin.com/in/ganeshshankar
Thank you!

22. Part-time Product Management
Training Courses
and Team Training
productschool.com