PM Career Growth

"The newsletter (and podcast) are growing fastest among non-PMs because, with the rise of AI engineers, the skills that matter more and more are PM skills: figuring out what to build, prioritizing the highest-ROI opportunities among endless ideas, getting buy-in, clearly and succinctly articulating requirements, having the taste and experience to know if what you’ve built is good, and driving adoption, growth, and retention."

"I was a very mediocre PM at first—I wouldn’t have hired me. But I did learn fast, mostly by watching how the best PMs operated. How they ran meetings, how they organized documents, how they made decisions—and then modeling these behaviors and habits."

"Great PMs build an aura of “I’ve got this.” They rarely drop balls, they come prepared, and their colleagues know that when they take on a task, it’ll get done."

"Great PMs hold the bar high for the work they, and their teammates, do. They resist the urge to let people settle for good enough. They push their team, and themselves, to make documents clearer, to make meetings more valuable, and to help people do the best work of their lives."

"Great PMs endlessly look for blockers to unblock. They’re always on the hunt for bottlenecks, unmade decisions, and anything that is keeping their team from operating like a well-oiled machine."

"Great PMs anticipate what’s around the corner so that they can get ahead of it. They know that the most successful PMs are the most prepared PMs, and the best way to be prepared is to have more time to prepare."

"From this perspective, we find that PMs have more influence than other functions at only 70% of companies (vs. 80% above). Clearly, PMs believe they have more influence than their teammates think they do."

"Web3 PM emphasizes building, marketing, and iterating rather than planning, managing, and measuring. Given the pace in web3, this prioritization of execution with the right principles has led to greater success."

"Work your way up this stack, finding ways to refine and optimize each step: Execution —> Strategy —> Vision"

"A technical background is a superpower for product managers, as I’ve said before. You’ll make better decisions, understand trade-offs, make more accurate estimates, and communicate with engineers with more confidence, while also creating more career opportunities for yourself."

"Building a strong foundation of technical skills improves your ability to bridge technical and business domains, uncover implementation issues before they’re in production, and improve your working relationships with your technical counterparts."

"As an early-career PM, it can be hard to understand what it takes to become a “senior” PM, and how to get there. That’s because senior PMs don’t actually need to be much better than a regular PM at the kind of work a regular PM does. The biggest differences are behind the scenes."

"Learn about SQL in a course or online, and start running queries. Take a class on statistics and experimental design."

"Truthfully, it’s tough to get significantly better at product management without actually doing product management. However, having time to step back, to process, to read deeply, and to build complementary skills is a rare gift and can indeed accelerate your progress once you return to the job."

"Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others."

"Pretending to learn feels good. Actual learning often feels bad. A lot of people are just pretending to learn (memorizing passwords) when they think they’re learning."

"As you move up the career ladder as a PM manager you become increasingly distant from the actual product. More and more your impact comes out of the work of other people. As Andy Grove famously shared in High Output Management, “the output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.”"

"As you progress in your PM career, moving from an individual contributor (IC), to a manager of PMs, to a manager of manager of PMs, your gaze rises from the week-to-week, to months out, to years out. You’re increasingly looking further out into the horizon — laying ground-work, anticipating challenges, and working towards a long-term vision."

"First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly possible."

"PMs often shoot themselves in the foot (and thus make all PMs look bad) by being, as you suggested, annoying. Especially new PMs who need to learn how to deliver results, without any real authority, under pressure."

"Much like how becoming a better communicator leads to better results from the people you work with, writing better prompts improves the responses you can get from AI. We already know that people can’t read our minds. But neither can AI, so you have to tell it what you want, as specifically as possible."

"Broadly, the best way to get better at developing strategy: 1. Spend time understanding your market (including your competition) 2. Spend time understanding your customers and their needs 3. Spend time crafting and executing strategies — and learn from those experiences 4. Study colleagues who are great strategic thinkers 5. Read about strategy"

"You don’t have to learn to code to see most of the benefits. Frankly, I wouldn’t spend any time there (unless you *really* want to). Instead, I’d start by learning a few basic concepts and then asking your engineering partners a ton of questions."

"If you’re ever feeling not *technical* enough, put together a list of questions, grab an engineer, find a whiteboard, and ask them questions until you start to understand WTF is going on."

"Finally, if you want to reach the pinnacle of being a technical PM, you need to learn to code and then build something yourself. Learning to code is a serious endeavor, and I won’t truly do it justice in one post."

"Instead, I believe that AI will have the most profound impact on the high-level (and historically most valued) skills of product management: developing a strategy, crafting a vision, identifying new opportunities, and setting goals. Furthermore, soft skills like product sense, communication, creativity, and being the glue that enables a team to operate at their very best will become even more important (and a differentiator among companies)."

"I’m saying you should double down on strengthening your soft skills (e.g. communication, collaboration, product sense, influence) and learn how to work with AI on creating more leverage in your hard skills (strategy, vision, data, setting goals)."

"Tooling will likely become incredibly good at catching unexpected behaviors. Feed it your PRD/1-pagers, and AI will tell you where it got stuck."

"The PM’s role here will shift to becoming very good at knowing what data to feed it and asking the right questions. And to be clear, I’m not saying you should quit building your strategic-thinking muscle—I’m just saying that AI will give you huge leverage here eventually."

"Thus, to realistically measure how close AI models are to replacing the work of a human—in our case, a product manager—we need to collect real-world examples of difficult PM tasks that AI tools seem to struggle with, use the best current model, and apply prompt engineering principles to give the models the best chance possible."

"AI is still a long way from working independently as a product manager. But it’s important to remember that right now is the worst AI will ever be at any task—these models may continue to get twice as good every six months."

"To make your work more noticeably human and less replaceable by AI, incorporating your niche interests and passions into your work seems like it would be a good strategy."

"It’s my belief that PMs are responsible for the “why.” Ideas of what we build come from anywhere (including our community!), and the “how” often comes from design and engineering. But I’m pretty insistent that PMs make it crystal clear why we’re solving a particular problem and why it’s important over anything else we could do."

"But one surprising twist is that senior ICs often out-earn managers, challenging the assumption that management roles always pay more. This trend suggests that the value of ICs is rising, a shift further reinforced by recent layoffs disproportionately affecting middle managers, thus “flattening” organizations."

"Many companies now recognize and value experienced ICs who can drive substantial impact. One senior IC, Tal Raviv, who appeared on a recent podcast with Lenny, offered this advice: “There’s a really good analogy here in engineering: … You shouldn’t have to rise into management in order to increase your compensation.”"

"New managers make less than senior ICs. The median new manager makes $265,000 in total comp per year—equivalent to an L4 IC PM. You have to hit M5 to make more than the most senior median IC PM."

"When you feed in all of that context that you’ve been trying to juggle yourself, your ChatGPT Project becomes a second brain that can store the information and synthesize it for you. That means that it can know and retrieve the right piece of data for the right problem—like an instantaneous librarian—and even use what it knows to run analyses and generate recommendations, like an associate PM."

"Similarly, if you’ve often been right before (e.g. have hit your goals, shipped great stuff, made the right calls), people are more likely to trust that you know what you’re doing, and go along with your suggestions. As it should be. This is why more-senior PMs can get things done more easily a lot of times—they’ve shown success many times."

"A PM that is good at nothing else but execution is valuable to a team, while a team with a PM that can’t execute is better off without that PM. Tactically this includes things like building a roadmap that everyone on your team is aligned behind, setting and hitting deadlines, and ruthlessly unblocking blockers."

"The job of a product manager is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of their team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems."

"Contribute to what is built, not just how it’s built. Your company is expecting more from you than simply coordinating, note-taking, and communicating."

"Your first 90 days at a new job have an outsize impact on your next one to two years at that company. It’s your chance to establish trust, influence, and build a reputation within the org. To do this well, you want to show quick wins: low-effort, high-impact changes that create a sense of “Holy shit, this person is amazing.”"

"A mind map of the domain: Inputs and outputs of the business equation. This helps the individual learn the space by dissecting it, but also gives a win to the team in terms of documentation. You can then easily pin existing projects to this map and plan for the future."

"Use mirroring in your interview process. How? Use their language when describing your experiences."

"To avoid burnout and get better results, I instead coach candidates to pick three to five recent major projects in their careers, and then remember every single detail they can recall about those projects"

"Though I don’t believe PMs will be displaced by GPT-4/5/6/n, I do believe that, as with most knowledge work, learning to work alongside AI will quickly become table stakes."

"Also, a pro tip: You can ask ChatGPT for advice on how to best phrase your prompt. It’s very meta and very cool."

"Chatbot tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are quickly becoming de facto co-pilots for product managers. I ran this poll on X and LinkedIn, and holy shit, over 50% of PMs who responded are now using a chatbot daily."

"I’d like to counter the notion that the only real PMs are those on empowered product teams. I believe that PMs on feature teams are also real product managers."

"My main thing I tell people is ‘Slow down.’ I think what I’ve found has been happening is, we’re so convinced that speed is the way you’re going to find the right answer that I just don’t think we slow down to develop meaningful mental models of the things we’re doing. By ‘mental model,’ I just mean if you’re running a marketplace, what is your model of what people care about? What makes people stay versus leave?"

"The amount of ambiguity facing a 1st time PM is tremendous. Often the founders/execs are still extremely hands on and aren’t comfortable sharing ownership. So there’s a lot of tension. Your job is to bring clarity and focus (i.e. decrease ambiguity) yet stay extremely flexible to changing things all over again every six months."

"Roll up your sleeves, be a team player. I had to wear many hats – QA, user research, API documentation, marketing, BD – to move the team fwd. While in other companies, you have someone in each role, you have to do it all at early stage."

"Regularly, and repeatedly, explain what a PM does and how this will be better, not worse, for your new teammates — many of whom will be used to going straight to engineers and getting them to build things. Your role is to start shielding engineers from the product roadmap being controlled by whoever made the most recent engineering ask, and you need to repeatedly make your new coworkers believe this is a good thing."

"First, take time to observe, listen, learn how & why things are done. You have but a short time to just be there before you need to do things. Make the most of it!"

"Stop debating opinions and talk to real users. Show your concepts to at least five users and use that to guide your thinking. Every time I’ve done this I’ve re-remembered how incredibly valuable talking to real users is."

"Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. It may seem like the folks you’re reading have it all figured out — but they don’t. They’ve learned a few things, and wrote about them, by going through the same process you’re about to go through. Take a few ideas at a time, discuss them with your team, and try them out in the real world."

"I like to think of a new PM joining your team much like a new roommate moving in to your apartment — even though you’ve interviewed them and did extensive reference checks, you’re still a little skeptical, not sure you want to trust them with the keys to the house, and wonder what this person actually does for a living."

"In most cases, it’s not worth it. There are better ways to accelerate your career (see below), especially if you already have a PM gig. When I’m looking at PMs for a potential role, nothing beats experience doing the actual job."

"A few alternatives to an MBA to accelerate your PM career (sorted by how I’d sequence them): 1. Talk to your manager — work together on a plan to level you up 2. Find a PM mentor (or two) and meet monthly — ask hard questions 3. Work on a variety of products and teams — spend time doing growth, building foundational tools, creating infra, etc."

"What people often miss when following their passions/interests is creating value for others. Without that, it’s just a hobby or a dead-end. You won’t always know what you enjoy or what you’re good at until you try it, but I try to make this my north star."

"Every successful person you know became successful because they were skilled at asking for help. What I’ve heard repeatedly from the many leaders I’ve met, and have found to be true in my own career, is that knowing when and how to enlist support is a career unlock."

"But the starting point for learning this skill is not running to your boss with your arms flailing. It’s befriending your fear enough that you can begin by making any ask at all—usually first to a friend or peer."

"A great PM doesn’t try to work things out on their own but instead stays in good, open relationship, and in dialogue, as things constantly emerge. Be an open system. This is realistic. Be realistic."

"Preparing gives you a big leg up, even if you spend just a few hours. A little prep helps you nail common questions, build frameworks for confronting unexpected questions, and gets your mind into the interviewing game (which is very different from doing the job itself)."

"Start by doing your homework on the product, the company, and its interview process. Use the product. Form an opinion about what could be improved, what you’d prioritize if you were in charge, and where the product might go in the future."

"Nothing will better help you prepare for an interview than actually doing interviews. Instead of reading about interviewing, start practicing with real people. I put this section above “Study” because too many people spend their time studying and not doing."

"Preparing gives you a big leg up, even if you spend just a few hours. A little prep helps you nail common questions, build frameworks for confronting unexpected questions, and gets your mind into the interviewing game (which is very different from doing the job itself)."

"In this newer, flatter tech industry, PMs who thrive will be the ones who build their own systems, methodologies, and tools to make the job work for *them*, not the other way around. They’ll start working “unfairly” today to lead successful teams without sacrificing their own well-being."

"There’s no better way to know what skills matter most in your role than by looking at how your company evaluates your performance. If you’re lucky, your manager has shared what’s called a career ladder (also known as a *leveling framework*, *career map*, *role guideline*, *competencies*, or *attributes list)*, which lays out the concrete expectations for your role at your level."

"There’s no better way to know what skills matter most in your role than by looking at how your company evaluates your performance."

"SQL is (and continues to be) the most mentioned hard skill in PM job descriptions. Although it’s declining over time, it’s still far above any other term. The fastest-growing term in PM job descriptions is, unsurprisingly, LLMs."

"Marily uses ChatGPT with a prompt of “Rewrite this mission statement for me,” and it produces something much better even on the first try, because it helps orient the words such that even kids and all stakeholders can understand and not just other PMs."

"On an individual level, as you suggested, reorgs are a great opportunity to take a step forward in your career. Some of the biggest jumps in my own career have come as a result of reorgs. The changing team structures often unlock new opportunities, new leadership roles, and if nothing else give you a chance to take on more responsibility."

"Get reps in with an exercise that develops both written and verbal muscles: Write down the rationale for 3 of your favorite products (touching on the key elements above), and grab time with a friend to verbally walk them through these in roughly 2 minutes."

"Product sense interviews assess your ability to identify user needs, articulate problems, and craft compelling solutions while demonstrating empathy, creativity, and structured thinking."

"The best candidates approach these interviews as a specific game with clear rules rather than a casual conversation."

"Since the interviewer’s job is to efficiently collect specific signals to complete their evaluation, your job as a candidate is to generate clear, easy-to-identify signals."

"In the simple form of the Magic Loop, you ask your manager what they need help to accomplish. However, as you understand your group and your company, you should be able to anticipate what needs to be done. In this model you evolve from asking what needs to be done to suggesting things that you can do that you believe will help."

"Being a new product manager is a lot like being a new President. You’re thrust into power, entrusted to lead people (many of whom you’ve barely met) to achieve ambitious goals, with limited authority, all the while learning how to do this job, on the job."

"Your first responsibility as a PM (especially as a new PM) is to help your team execute, today. To ship, to hit dates, to make sure everyone knows what they should be working on. But many PMs come into the role expecting to spend most of their time developing strategy, visioning, and thinking big."

"On the one hand, understanding your developers, their process, and their work is part and parcel of shipping products effectively. On the other hand, you don’t want to step on your engineers’ toes, and getting too deep into the codebase isn’t a great use of your time. One point we can all agree on, though: a strong technical knowledge foundation means a more effective PM."

"Choices of programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure all come with important trade-offs that impact what might make a project something that could take a few hours, or a few weeks. But perhaps more qualitatively, speaking the language of your engineers helps build trust and improves communication."

"Knowing the hardest parts of the app to work on can help you plan more effectively and avoid project delays. There might not be much you can do about this as a PM, but it’s useful knowledge to have and can help you allocate resources more effectively."

"Writing code is only half the battle—you need to get it to your users by deploying the changes to production. Larger teams and more complex apps can have multi-day deployment processes that may delay projects and add to lead time. Knowing these pressure points can also help you more effectively batch features and understand what’s worth doing when."

"Great products have great copy, and you shouldn’t have to rely on your engineers to fix typos. Being able to make small changes yourself, be it copy or fixing an errant border radius (generally frontend stuff), will result in more polished products shipped faster."

"Outside of your company’s codebase, you need a basic understanding of how apps, data, and infrastructure work. Beyond being able to code, a conceptual understanding of what pieces come together to build applications is table stakes."

"The team looks to their PM to keep things running smoothly, productively, and happily. Thus, as you transition into this new role, focus on these softer skills — teamwork, collaboration, execution, buy-in, and communication. Don’t expect that hitting your goals will be the only thing that matters to your career as a PM, particularly as an IC."

"Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems."

"Assuming that’s true, early in your PM career it's best to focus on (1) shipping wins, (2) learning best practices, (3) getting baseline credentials and (4) starting your network."

"How do you know what kind of company you’re working at? A rule of thumb is wherever the majority of your growth comes from, that’s who’s driving the ship."

"1. Shape the product: Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will have optimal impact on the business 2. Ship the product: Ship high-quality product on time and free of surprises 3. Synchronize the people: Align all stakeholders aligned around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort"

"AI is good at doing what it’s told, but someone needs to be skilled at pointing it in the right direction, iterating until the work is great, shipping it, and driving adoption. That’s literally the job of a product manager."

"The most valued skill set will increasingly shift from building to knowing what to build, giving clear instructions for what to build, and having the taste to know if what you’ve created is great."

"Stop reading about AI and use it. Experiment with using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude in your day-to-day work."

"Check out some of Andrej Karpathy’s videos explaining how LLMs work. Check out Andrew Ng’s online courses on machine learning, and AI for everyone."

"Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team (both human and AI) to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems."