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5 maturity steps when you are a young PM

When you are a young PM, one of the questions that arises more often is: What do you need to achieve a senior PM attitude? Let’s focus on a typical situation for young PMs to analyze this question: How do you behave when you found an issue/problem? It could be product problem, a customer situation, a company internal process issue etc…

These are the steps to grow from associate PM to more senior roles.

• Step 1: You discover an issue and you share the problem found ASAP. Discovering the problem is the most important thing for you. This is what you do when you have 0 experience and you don’t realize yet that there is zero value on this behavior.
• Step 2: You also do a quick assessment showing the viable options to solve the issue. The fastest the better because you still want to share the issue that you found asap.
• Step 3: After doing the assessment, you present one option as the best one to your line manager.
• Step 4: You talk to everybody involved in the problem to understand every approach and implications before select the best option. You include every approach in the assessment
• Step 5: You communicate to everybody the decision and re-arrange the rest of things impacted, talking to those who have negative impact first.

This is only a situation that I found quite often. This is a path to walk over years so do not rush, just have these steps in mind during your week. By the way, the organization/culture of your company will help you (or stop you) to gain this experience

In order to get more experience and move along those 5 steps, you need to embrace new skills:

1. Be patient in the assessment, quick in the execution
2. Accountability and responsibility. You are the owner. Final outcome is on you. So, you need to take the hits. Just remember “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.” John Stark.
3. Empathy: mainly listening to every one (ALSO from other teams), understanding what it is important to them
4. Generate confidence in others will easy up your whole job.

All those skills breath together. There is no confidence on you if you do not listen others and do not take full responsibility.