Making the leap from IC Product Manager to Manager
Every company has their own rubric on what makes a good PM Manager, but in my time I’ve found that an IC needs to demonstrate 3 skills to be true to become a PM manager.
prove that you understand being an IC PM inside and out (you’re going to be coach IC PMs as a manager),
have management-specific needs covered like building out white space for a team, finding people to delegate to, and resolving interpersonal conflict, and
have an advocate willing to, and with the scope/headcount to execute on, promoting (or horizontally moving) you
So, that’s it and almost exactly the rubric I put down when looking to promote an IC to manager (in addition to role/scope-specific needs). Managers, what else do you look for when promoting someone? ICs, where else do you feel like you’re stuck?
I’m not going to cover being a strong IC in this note, but part of managing PMs is coaching/teaching, and you can’t coach what you don’t know. It doesn’t mean you have to be the best IC ever, but you should be able to identify what’s going well and what isn’t in yourself and when working with other PMs. Ok, on to the meat of it.
3 skills to nail to show you can be a successful PM Manager
(1) Building out white space for the team. A lot of what a manager does is create space for the PMs on their team to execute. That means looking ahead at what the business needs, seeing how those problems are/aren’t being addressed, and building buy-in around a vision (and clear org lines) that stakeholders can get behind put a team of engineers, designers, PM, etc on to solve the problem.
IC PMs can show this by executing beyond their scope, finding new problems that their team can solve with the product features they own (or, sometimes with ones they don’t). If a PM has a consistent track record of taking their team to build in a new space, I put a check on this one.
(2) Finding the right person to delegate work to. There are always too many things to do as an IC PM, and it only gets busier as a manager. Now you have multiple people’s scopes, strategies, fires, and team issues that you’re responsible for. Successful PM Managers identify skill sets and personal drivers (note here on identifying personal drivers) within their team and delegate work to those people to free up their own time for the highest leverage work.
IC PMs can do the same thing on their team: find the engineer looking to get ahead who has a knack for data analysis to help you figure out what’s really going on with your MVP test or the UXR researcher who excels at framing learnings for executives to help build out a section of an upcoming product review. IC PMs who consistently find “free” work from their team and across their org check the box here.
(3) Resolving interpersonal conflict within and between teams. As a PM Manager, sometimes I feel like all I do is resolve conflicts between teams: who owns a specific scope, which value matters more in a given a tradeoff. And often, the reason the issue escalates to me is because of a difference in personal working styles between the teams (note on resolving conflicts between teams…try this before escalating please!).
IC PMs who consistently get to the root cause of an issue before escalating, including interpersonal differences, show me that they can do this on a higher level. I also look for PMs that have high morale on their teams while successfully executing: this demonstrates that the PM understands what makes the people on their team tick!
I check the boxes…why am I not a PM manager yet?
Lastly, you need an advocate and someone with the open role and scope to hire a PM manager. Often, these can both be your manager who is grooming you to be a PM Manager.
Ask your manager, skip manager, and other managers in the org whom you trust whether or not they see that you have the skills to be a manager of PMs. If you do, it’s all about hunting down the right opportunity, which is especially difficult in tech right now given constrained hiring…it’s much easier to find new Manager roles when headcount is growing.