Exploring Product Management Career Paths

These days, there are a lot of articles and resources talking about how to break into product — but what can you do after you become a product manager? The options are honestly limitless.

Because of how multi-disciplinary product management is, having a product background can lead you in so many different directions.

Career Paths, Broadly

First, let us consider the typical trajectory career paths in product.

Diagram courtesy of Peng Hong, an amazing UX designer and friend.

Most fresh hires straight out of college start from an Associate Product Manager level. As you gain more experience, this soon transitions to the Product Manager title. Around here or at the Senior Product Manager level, career paths begin branching out to people management or it can continue to progress within individual contribution capacities.

As you rise in seniority, the scope of your responsibilities starts increasing. If you want to stay close to the product, the types of products and complexity you manage would keep growing. If you go down the path of managing others, your job now becomes more about enabling and motivating those under you. The better you are at unblocking problems for others, the more the reporting structure under you is likely to grow: what you push for becomes increasingly strategic.

I’m thinking… CEO

At this point, most people imagine the typical corporate trajectory would lead towards roles such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs); especially since we often call ourselves “mini-CEOs” (a very hot topic that we will not go into today). It just seems like a logical choice. Ask so many of us, and we would probably say that’s what we aspire to reach in our careers.

To be fair, there are a number of examples of CEOs that have product backgrounds. Being a product manager does feed pretty well into CEO careers. Some examples include:

• Autodesk, Andrew Anagnost
• YouTube, Susan Wojcicki
• Google, Sundar Pichai
• Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer
• Adobe, Shantanu Narayen
• PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi

What about other awesome opportunities?

While being a CEO is an amazing aspiration in itself, let’s explore some of the myriads of other opportunities you could consider on the way there or as an alternative path. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of inspirational people who have forged new trails:

Found/start your own company

• Eventbrite, Julia Hartz
• Medium, Twitter, Blogger, Ev Williams
• LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman
• Instagram, Kevin Systrom
• Kiva.org, Premal Shah

Drive strategy

• Salesforce, Alex Dayon

Invest in others

• Ubisoft & LesMills, Frederique Dame
• Sequoia, Jess Lee

Variants of the Chief Product Officer (CPO) role

• Slack, April Underwood
• Bloomberg, Julia Beizer

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

• Docker, Scott Johnston
• Intercom, Karen Peacock

If you have any suggestions on other great individuals who belong in this list, please leave a comment below.

Great background — but how do I use this information to get towards my own goals?

There are, of course, a number of different things you could do to apply learnings from the experiences of others. By reading more about some of the paths taken by current leaders, you can form your own opinions about what appeals to you and what doesn’t. You could reach out to product leaders you already know, or someone from the list above and further a conversation about their experiences.

I’ve often gravitated towards design thinking exercises when thinking broadly about career goals and aspirations. Watch this space for some ideas on how to do opportunity mapping.