The Seniors, the Staffs and the Principals
The other track in the product management career ladder
This article is based on extensive research on best practices at companies such as Intercom, Meta, Microsoft, Gitlab, Remote, Echobot, Leadfeeder, Farewill, Depop, Catalyst and others. All research was conducted in October and November 2022. This content has been presented at the Mind the Product 2023 Conference [slides are available here].
The problem with a single track ladder: Feeling stuck
As a product coach I speak to a lot of people leaders who feel stuck. Leaders who miss building products, who are drained by managing under performers, fixing mis-levelling, or being the face of decisions they don’t agree with.
And individual contributors (ICs) who really don’t want to manage anyone, scared of declining that promotion to manager, because they fear they will be seen as unambitious. Incredible ICs who would rather quit, than be forced into a management position.
These are people who find themselves, like put it, “climbing someone else’s ladder”. In this article I’d like to show you another fundamentally different path. So that you may be guided by curiosity and joy, exploring what feels interesting, rather than following a single predetermined linear path.
The dual track career ladder principles
The solution has been around for a few years, particularly in the engineering world, it’s a dual track career ladder. Rather than a single linear path, we carve out a separate path for ICs. For this to be successful you need a few principles.
Principle 1: Same level, same pay
There is no pay difference for roles at the same level. Management does not pay more than the equivalent Individual Contributor role at the same level.
This is critical to enable people to be guided by what they are best at, and what they enjoy, rather than pursuing management for the sake of a larger pay check.
For this to work for our lovely finance colleagues, the highest IC levels need to have a large an impact as their management counterparts, and we’ll get to how you achieve that later.
Principle 2: First master product
To be a manager of product people, you first need to master product management. This means the track only bifurcates after a few exclusively IC roles.
This enables early career product managers (PMs) to focus on developing their craft before they take on supporting other people, enabling them to be stronger managers in the future.
Principle 3: You can change your mind
You can always change your mind by making lateral moves at the same level. This enables people to try out different branches of the ladder, moving to and from the IC track, without fear of losing out on status or salary.
This type of experimentation enables people to live out multiple careers within the company, retaining them for longer.
This principle is likely to be the most controversial, particularly as one gets to the top of each track, the lateral transition becomes much harder. The skills required to be a Distinguished PM are vastly different to those of a CPO.
Depending on how much support the individual can get to ramp up during their move, and how quickly they are expected to ramp up to meet expectations, it might be appropriate for the move to take them one level lower in the other track. Though my recommendation would always be to make lateral moves within the same level, by investing in coaching, mentoring, leadership training, and other types of ramp up support.
Principle 4: Equally tall tracks
Making both the IC and Management track the same height prevents ICs from feeling they will hit a ceiling. And that to continue to progress they will eventually be forced into management.
Principle 5: Unique titles per level
Giving each level a distinct title enables people to celebrate each other’s career milestones, and promotions.
As you’ll see in the examples below, Meta, Stripe and others call everyone a Product Manager regardless of level. They hope that it will make decisions egalitarian, and title agnostic. In practice people crave progression and recognition, so internally they all refer to each other by their levels (something like PM 4 through 10).
Principle 6: Unique titles per track
The last principle I’d suggest is to keep titles unique across tracks. This makes it clear who is an IC vs a Manager. And sets expectations correctly across the organisation.
Examples from the industry
The product community owes a lot to , including his effort to open source career ladders. He crowdsourced a large amount of ladders which are available in his newsletter and in a spreadsheet.
While there are many ladders that are still linear, like Google, Stripe and Slack, there is a large and growing amount of dual track ladders.
LinkedIn has distinct titles per track, with the exception of Vice Presidents, which confusingly are shared across tracks, but on two different levels.
Intercom does pretty well against our principles, except the two tracks are not quite the same height. They also, like Twitter and Mixpanel, use a slightly less common title “Staff” in between Senior and Principal.
In this article I’ll be using the following ladder, loosely based on Onfido’s ladder:
You can scale it up or down depending on the size and complexity of your organisation.
For example a larger company might want to add in between layers, resulting in something like this:
- Distinguished | CPO
- Senior Principal | SVP
- Principal | VP
- Senior Staff | Senior Director
- Staff | Director
- Senior II | Senior Group
- Senior I | Group
- PM II
- PM I
- Associate
Alternatively a smaller organisation, such as a start up, might want to hold on before introducing too many layers, and have something similar to:
- Principal | VP
- Senior | Group
- PM
- Associate
Hopefully you can do the mental gymnastics to translate to your own ladder, as you read through.
So who are these people, who are these Staffs, these Principals, these Distinguished PMs? I’ll be taking you through their experience, the scope they take on, we’ll look at two different models of how the dual track model can be set up and finally we’ll look at some archetypes.
Experience and Scope
For a ladder of this size, I’d define these roles as roughly these years of direct product management experience:
- Senior: minimum of 3 years
- Staffs: 5 to 8 years
- Principals: 10+ years
- Distinguished: product management veterans, 15 to 20+ years
I’m talking here about multiple cycles of building, measuring and learning by shipping products, as well as cycles of seeing industries being born, maturing and changing. These timeframes enable each level to have the right level of perspective and pattern matching when facing new problems.
These higher ranks might also require specific expertise in their domain or industry. Examples could be payments expertise, machine learning experience, or many years doing growth product management.
With experience and expertise comes the ability to tackle increasingly complex scope.
For each level the scope and complexity increases. With this many layers I’d define scope as follows:
- Seniors own large high scrutiny products,
- Staffs work on the most complex and ambiguous or highest risk/reward product for a line of business or group,
- Principals are expected to change the direction of the company,
- And Distinguished PMs should be changing the industry.
During my research I interviewed a bunch of very senior ICs, and one of them shared with me a few analogies to think about scope and impact. Talking about the complexity, risk and ambiguity tackled by Staff PMs he said:
It’s like “you’re on the aeroplane with nowhere to land, you send them in with a chainsaw to make a runway for the plane to land.”
— Quote by Luke Abrams, ex-principal PM at Microsoft and Skype
He also had this other nugget which I loved:
“Microsoft retroactively promotes based on impact.
To get a Principal (level 66) promotion your product impact needed to have to made the evening news, for a Principal (Level 67) promotion you have to bump up the stock price.”
— Quote by Luke Abrams, ex-principal PM at Microsoft and Skype
Talk about justifying a high pay!
Two models for the IC track: Player Coach vs Pure IC
So we looked at our six principles, and these people’s experience and scope, but that still doesn’t tell us… what do they actually do? And how do they work with the rest of the org?
In my research I found there are two models to set up a dual track ladder: Player Coach and Pure IC.
Player Coach Track
The Player Coach track is what argued for in 2021 in his blog It’s Time to Fight for a Dual Product Management Career Path.
In his blog Ken tells the story of Kangaroo and Rabbit. At their company, a new massively strategic opportunity comes up: leverage their market position to create an identity product. The director of product Kangaroo is spending most of their time people management, and wouldn’t be able to take this bet on.
So they promote a Group PM called Rabbit to a Principal role, so he can start this new company level bet from scratch with a very small team of PMs.
The Player Coach track is effectively an extension of the Group Product Manager role. This is typically the first role in the Management Track. It’s a player coach role where you work in a cross functional team as a PM, and also manage max 3 people.
Progression on the Player Coach track, comes not from managing more people, but from tackling increasingly impactful, risky and complex products: Staff at group level, Principal at company level and so on.
In the Player Coach track product people:
- Have small line management responsibilities: 2–3 people max
- Build product in a cross functional team, and group
- Define strategy for that group
Typically this model is suitable for 0 to 1 products.
From my research this is not a very common set up. The main example I could find was at Microsoft, where very senior ICs have a “whatever it takes” attitude to drive impact, and that might occasionally include line management. This has also recently happened at Atlassian, where their Distinguished PM took on a few reports to drive bigger impact on his product.
Pure IC Track
The Pure IC track is more common, and I’ve seen it at a bunch of places including Intercom, Gitlab, Remote, Meta and others.
In the Pure IC track, product people:
- Build product — while at Staff you might still be embedded in a cross-functional team, at Principal and Distinguished this isn’t always the case
- Have no line management responsibilities
- Contribute to strategy in their group
- Are peers to people leaders for their group in strategy, but also wider leadership decisions
The main difference here is that you don’t manage anyone. And you drive strategy and product execution within a group with a people leader peer.
This is how we set up the IC ladder at Onfido. Back when I was a Director there, was a Staff PM in my line of business. He was the PM in a cross functional team, on the most complex and risky scope for our line of business.
He then paired with with me and our other group leaders to define the strategy for the line of business. Let me show you this in practice.
We had a business goal of increasing margins. Which I, as the Director for the line of business, then translated into line of business themes.
We can contribute to the company’s gross margin goals by cutting costs on our product line and/or by continuing to command a premium price point.
André and I then split efforts on translating those themes into actionable goals for cross functional teams. I worked on Theme Costs (green above), and André, on Theme Premium (blue above), which required quite complex discovery around price sensitivity and value prop before we could figure out the right levers to pull.
The bottom leaves, in the diagram above, were then the “Desired Outcome” top node of the opportunity solution trees for the cross functional teams.
They key difference here, vs in the Player Coach track, is that Strategy work for the line of business was shared between me, the people leader, and the André, the Staff PM. It would have been extremely difficult for me to define the Premium Theme strategy, with 6 direct reports. It would also have been way too risky to assign that work to someone at a Senior level.
Just like in the Payer Coach track, on the Pure IC track progression comes from increased complexity in the products and expected impact per level of the ladder: group, company, industry as we saw before.
The reason why I believe the Pure IC track is more popular is the fact that it has zero line management responsibilities. The whole point of having an IC track is to enable people who don’t want to be managers to continue to develop and grow.
This Pure IC track also gives managers with a lot of directs some more time to focus on developing talent and growing the org.
It’s also really helpful for orgs where you need large amounts of strategic input from a PM with deep subject matter expertise, or a PM who is excellent at debugging failing products.
Impact beyond building and strategy: Archetypes
Regardless of which model you pick, Pure IC track or Player Coach track (or maybe even you could set up three tracks!), as you go up the ladder, impact beyond building and strategy contributions starts to become expected.
In some companies this type of additional of impact is codified and explicitly required per level.
For example at Gitlab, the jump from what we are calling Staff to Principal comes with a very large amount of increased expectations across multiple dimensions. In addition to building product and setting strategy, Senior Principals at Gitlab are expected to coach other PMs, lead complex projects across multiple teams, elevate the company’s product practices, improve how the company executes and do plenty of external evangelism. This is a very large increase, vs the previous level that only does coaching PMs in addition to building and strategy.
In other companies you might agree with your manager how you’d like to contribute to the wider organisation, based on your preference, specialist skills and needs of the organisation.
As I made my way through my research, I found four archetypes emerge.
The Hatcher
This PM has built a reputation for being able to create and successfully take to market new products within established organisations.
Their impact beyond building and strategy might be:
- Coaching others to be better at 0 to 1
- Or improving way the org executes on new product launches.
The Fixer
This PM has honed the skills to diagnose and fix dying products or organisations. They act like almost an internal consultant, investigating the root cause and tackling it together with their people leadership peers.
Their impact beyond building and strategy might be:
- Leading product fixing projects across multiple teams,
- Or by incorporating their “fixed it” learnings into improved org wide product practices.
The Industry Moulder
This PM has deep industry relationships that enable them to be highly influential.
Their impact beyond building and strategy might be:
- Elevating the company’s position in the industry through evangelism
- Shaping the future of the industry
The practice lead
These PMs love elevating how their organisation does product management and this spills over externally too.
Beyond building and strategy, these PMs drive organisation wide improvement through:
- Coaching
- Product practice evangelism
- Upgrading the PM toolkit
From what I’ve seen the Hatcher and Fixer tend to move on to another part of the organisation once the big complex issue is resolved. Typically they would stay within their area for at least 6 months to a year, maybe two years for very complex launches or fixes. Whereas the Industry Moulder and Practice Lead tend to be more central and fixed roles.
These archetypes are by no means exhaustive. Our profession is still very young and evolving, and you might find yourself pioneering another archetype in your career.
It’s up to us
My hope is that with everything I shared with you here, from Ladder Principles to IC PM Archetypes, you have started wondering:
- Is people leadership the right track for me? Am I blindly climbing someone else’s ladder?
- What do I really want? What am I excited about?
Take a moment to write this down: What gives me energy? What drains me? Make a list.
Ultimately a dual track ladder is all about enabling you to retain your best talent for longer. It give people room to try stuff out and change their minds without fear of losing influence or pay. It give people a chance to have multiple fulfilling careers within the organisation.
If you’re a people leader today, and the many of you who will be the next generation people leaders, you’re the key to making a dual track ladder the standard in our profession.
Let’s make sure no other PM ever feels stuck on someone else’s ladder again.
With many thanks to Jane Honey, Luke Abrams, , , , , Marcus Hickman, , Aamir Chishtie, , Andita Shantikatara and .
