Q: What, in concrete terms, does the jump from Senior PM to manager of PMs look like and how do you set yourself up for that move?
I moved into a PM manager role about four years into my PM career. There were a lot of surprises in the new role, and I hadso much impostor syndrome, but I never once wanted to go back. Having other amazing PMs doing the work — better than I would — what a dream!
In one sense managing PMs is the same job as an IC PM — marshaling the resources of your team to ship product and deliver business impact. In practice, it’s completely different. Instead of working directly on the product, everything now happens indirectly, through your PM team.
As a result, your role is now all about leverage. It’s now abouthelping your teams more effectively marshals their resources to ship product and deliver business impact. To paraphrase, Andy Grove:
A PM manager’s output = the output of their team + the output of the neighboring teams under their influence
Below, I’ll share the top five things I found most surprising about the switch to managing PMs, advice for setting yourself up for the move, and tips for being successful in the new role. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Top 5 unexpected jobs of a PM manager:
- ✋ Stopping stupid sh*t from happening
- 🪓 Unblocking, unblocking, unblocking
- 🏆 Preserving (and improving) the PM team quality bar
- 🧐 Preserving (and improving) the product quality bar
- 🤝 Building a strong and united leadership group
Top 5 ways to get promoted to PM manager:
- 👏 Demonstrate that you can lead people
- 📈 Demonstrate that you can deliver
- 🧘♀️ Demonstrate that you can handle complexity
- 👌 Demonstrate that you develop a winning vision and strategy
- ☝️ Ask for it
Top 5 tips for being successful as a PM manager:
- 🏗 It’s all about increasing the leverage of your team
- 🤫 It’s more about teaching than doing
- 😁 There are many ways to do the job
- 🤝 It’s essential to bring everyone along
- 🥳 You don’t have to get into management
Let’s dive in.
Top five unexpected jobs of a PM manager:
1. ✋ Your job is to stop stupid sh*t from happening
You are now in a higher echelon of influence and visibility. As such, your team (and the company) are relying on you to have an active hand in shaping what gets done. Use this newfound power! When you see stupid sh*t happening, within your team or anywhere in the company, push back and ask direct questions. You’ll be surprised by how much impact your opinion now has.
2. 🪓 Your job is to unblock, unblock, unblock
How do you help your teams become more effective? Not by doing IC PM work (e.g. roadmapping, creating 1-pagers, running every meeting). Instead, it’s by leveraging your newfound influence and authority to unblock your teams at every level: Short-term (e.g. making sure decisions are made), medium-term (e.g. hiring quickly to fill gaps), and long-term (e.g. aligning everyone around a winning vision and strategy). Anything that slows your team down or leads to wasted work is now your fault.
Every day, you should be asking yourself two questions:
- What is most slowing my teams down right now?
- What will most slow my team down in the next couple of months?
3. 🏆 Your job is to preserve (and improve) the PM team quality bar
At larger companies, you’ll now be included in the performance review and calibration process. This means you’ll have a hand in determining what great performance looks like at every level. The default path is to make everyone feel good by letting OK work slide. The more courageous path is to push everyone around you to keep that bar as high as possible. Rage against the dying of the light.
Ask yourself and your PM team:
- Are we proud of where our PM team is heading?
- What are we doing to maintain a high bar?
- Who are PMs who were prematurely promoted, and what can we learn from this?
4. 🧐 Your job is to preserve (and improve) the product quality bar
Your teammates will now be coming to you for design reviews, strategy feedback, goal setting, etc. The natural tendency will be to make everyone happy by going with the flow — letting good enough work through. Don’t let this happen. You are now the torch-bearer for the quality, ambition, and innovation that happens within your team, (and adjacent teams). Without micromanaging and telling everyone exactly what to do, push your team to think deeper and go further. Ask yourself and your team:
- What’s one thing we can do to push this just one step further?
- If we had more time, what would we do differently?
- How excited are we about this direction?
5. 🤝 Your job is to build a strong and united leadership group
As an IC PM, your team was your cross-functional IC peers (e.g. engineers, designers, DS, researchers, etc). As a manager, your team is now your peer managers (e.g. EM, design manager, DS manager, etc). It’s essential that you work as one unit because your team will be looking to you each of you for a clear direction and confidence. Put just as much, if not more, effort into building a strong relationship with this new team than you did with your IC team. Sit together, have a weekly leads meeting, and constantly be checking in with each other on priorities, blockers, and personnel issues. The more cohesive your leadership team, the more cohesive your entire time will be.
Now, let’s turn our attention to getting promoted to a PM manager.
Top 5 ways to get promoted to PM manager
The best way to get promoted into any role, including a PM manager, is to make it obvious you’d do a great job in that new role. This involves a combination of doing the job before you have the job, demonstrating that you have the necessary skills, and simply asking for it. Below are five areas to focus on.
1. 👏 Demonstrate that you can lead people
PMs are often the de-facto team leader, and PM managers even more so. Demonstrate to your manager that you will be able to lead others effectively as you take on more responsibility and scope. Some ways to demonstrate this:
- Run a well functioning team
- Find initiatives within the company to lead, and be successful in doing so
- Mentor 2-3 junior PMs and demonstrate their growth
- Successfully present to and get buy-in from senior leadership
- Take leadership courses
2. 📈 Demonstrate that you can deliver
At the root of PM leadership is delivering impact. You’ll only be promoted if leaders believe they can rely on you to deliver impact at a broader scale. Some ways to demonstrate this:
- Hit your team goals regularly
- Deliver on a significant initiative that has meaningful business impact
- Take on an ambitious project and land it successfully
- Surface the successes you have
- Kill your darlings
3. 🧘♀️ Demonstrate that you can handle complexity
The more senior you get in an organization, the more responsibility, scope, and complexity you’ll be dealing with. Demonstrate that you can not just handle, but thrive, in complexity. Some ways to demonstrate this:
- Take on a complex project (or two) and land it successfully
- Support another PM leader on a complex project, and help them through it
- Take overly-complex strategy documents and simplify them for others
4. 👌 Demonstrate that you can develop a winning vision and strategy
As you move up the ranks of the PM org, you’ll be spending less time executing and more time developing and aligning around a vision and strategy for your team and product. So spend more time doing this now! Set time aside to get out of the day-to-day and think ahead. Some ways to demonstrate this:
- Craft a winning strategy and get buy-in from leaders
- Align around ambitious and clear goals, and hit them
- Inspire those around you with your clear and ambitious vision
5. ☝️ Ask for it
Finally, and often forgotten: make sure your manager knows you want to get into management. Do not assume this is assumed. It’s essential that when roles open up leaders not only feel confident you’ll succeed but also know that you want it. Some ways to do this:
- Bring this up in your performance reviews
- Bring this up occasionally in 1:1’s
- Ask your manager to schedule regular career conversations
Bonus: What’s the one thing you wish you knew when moving from IC to PM manager?
I asked on Twitter what new PM managers wished they knew when they moved into management. Here are the top five most common pieces of advice:
1. 🏗 It’s all about increasing the leverage of your team
2. 🤫 It’s more about teaching than doing
3. 😁 There are many ways to do the job
4. 🤝 It’s essential to bring everyone along
5. 🥳 You don’t have to get into management
🤓 Further study
- Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader by Fareed Mosavat & Casey Winters
- Applying Leverage as a Product Manager by Brandon Chu
-
My favorite books for new PM managers
-
The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhou
- Quiet Leadership by David Rock
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott
- Drive by Dan Pink
- High Output Management by Andy Grove
That’s it for this week!
🔥 Job opportunities
- Product: Cerebral, ClassDojo, Hipcamp, Product Hunt
- Growth: Coda, Instrumentl, Levels, Shef, Wren
- Design: Pachama, Office Hours, Runway, Stytch, Watershed
- Engineering manager: Cerebral
- Frontend engineer: Cascade, Levels, Transform
- Backend engineer: Coda, Sourcetable
- Fullstack engineer: Centered, Coda, Icebreaker, Iggy, Primer, Runway, Snackpass
- iOS engineer: Pairplay, Primer, Vori
🧠 Inspiration for the week ahead
- Read: The GEM Model by Gibson Biddle
These paid editions are intended for a single recipient, but occasional sharing is totally fine. If you would like to order multiple subscriptions for your team (with a group discount) just reply to this email.
Sincerely,
Lenny 👋