In the second of three posts about the product management hierarchy, we’ll focus on technology product managers (PMs) who’ve been in their jobs long enough to consider what comes next. (User story: “As a Senior Product Manager, I want to be promoted to Director so that I get more money and respect and glory.”)
Let’s break this problem into a few parts: likely candidates for promotion; how the Director job differs from line Product Management; and ways to show that you’re ready for a bigger role. Continue reading
A thoughtful choice between “I” and “we” and “you” is a reflection of the workplace emotional temperature: are managers and executives motivating line employees to do their best, or “throwing them under the bus?” Are we rewarding cross-functional cooperation and market impact, or angling for promotion and impressing our peers? 
Recently, I had lunch with a bright young product manager trying to perfect the process for deciding which features to include in his next product release. Skipping past theory about “internal ROI” and other quantitative approaches, we talked about having to choose among the many demands for enhancements from sales teams: that MRDs are only the starting point in an ongoing lobbying campaign for product improvements. In other words, product managers will always have to manage the emotional world of people and internal politics. 
A perennial problem for Product Management (PM) is finding the right organizational home. In companies large enough to have a PM department, it has a tendency to oscillate between Marketing and Engineering. Two root causes for this are role confusion and organizational distance. Let’s walk through each in turn, while trying to map a PM’s place in the grand scheme.