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Moving from Individual Contributor to Product Leader
What you need to think about if you’re crossing the leadership chasm
Ah product leadership, the promised land. When you get there, you’ve made it! Everyone will listen to you! You’ll be leading with influence and authority! You’ll finally be the CEO of Product that you always dreamed of. That’s how it all works, right?
Well, I hate to break it to you, superstar individual contributor & budding superstar leader, but actually there’s more work to do, and it’s not the same.
Product Leadership isn’t just Product Management but more Leader-y
It can be quite common, not just in product management by the way, for really strong individual contributors to get promoted into leadership because, well, they’re strong individual contributors. That’s certainly how I first started out in leadership all those years ago. It makes sense, right? Who better to inspire individual contributors than the best individual contributor?
This supposes two things.
One, that the particular individual contributor has any idea what leadership really involves (and isn’t just copying other people who were promoted without knowing what leadership involves).
Two, that they actually want to be a leader and aren’t just being forced into it because there aren’t any other options available to them to advance their career.
Personally, I’m very happy to see the increasing popularity of Principal Product Manager type roles where really good, strong PMs who have little to no interest in leading teams or product portfolio strategy can be remunerated and recognised for what they’re good at. We need more of these types of roles (this is also true for engineers, and doubtless for many other professions).
What Product Leadership really involves
It’s fair to say that product management doesn’t have some kind of ISO specification for job roles and responsibilities. A variety of companies have worked out their own weird and wonderful ways to bastardise the product manager job description (and in some cases seemingly stick two random bits of job description together and hope). It’s also fair to say that this doesn’t…
