# How to Advance in the Product Management Career Path  ## Metadata - Author: [[Elena Calvillo]] - Full Title: How to Advance in the Product Management Career Path - Category: #articles - URL: https://medium.com/p/eccc969b359d ## Highlights - Associate Product Managers are responsible for assisting Product Managers in day-to-day tasks such as setting priorities, keeping peers and managers updated, and working on smaller scale projects - Product Managers understand the company’s strategy, are able to successfully run projects and make straightforward roadmapping decisions. They typically follow processes and frameworks to the letter but lack good judgment on when to emphasize and when to work outside of the process. - The PM is consulted for advice on the process, relationships, tactical moves and delivery timelines for the product area. Other teams see the Product Manager as the key team player who knows all the answers about the projects of the product team. - Senior PMs are highly skilled professionals who have a holistic view of problems and can quickly identify what’s most important. They are able to drive alignment among partners with competing goals and objectives, create and maintain roadmaps, and evangelize their work to ensure their team gets the recognition it deserves. - Responsibilities for Senior PMs may include creating long-term strategies, executing go-to-market plans, mitigating enterprise risk, collaborating with other teams, building business cases, presenting findings to senior leaders, ability to run one or more teams independently, solve complex and ambiguous problems, and drive end-to-end success for the product. - A Principal Product Manager is a high-level senior product manager who is responsible for the success of an important product for a company, but does not manage other product managers. - Principal PMs take on the most complex and high-stakes projects and have a high level of autonomy in driving their ideas from conception to execution. They mentor and shape the culture of the PM team, bring unique expertise to the company, and are trusted to make decisions that have the highest impact on the company. - Lead Product Managers start the Leader/Manager path. They excel at everything a Senior Product Manager does, but faster which allows them to have more responsibilities. Meaning, bigger scope, autonomy, and impact. They are often a player-coach, both managing PMs and responsible for their own feature teams, and have authority to make small decisions on their own. - A Director or Group PM is responsible for leading a product or large product area and helping ensure teams within it are successful. They create and drive an impactful strategy, manage and recruit talented PMs, review product work, create product principles, and ensure teams have good goals. They are also responsible for operational excellence and finding ways to increase resources to achieve top priorities. - The Head of Product is an executive member of a company and an advisor to the CEO. They work across functions with the other executives to drive strategy and operations. They are also the leader of the product organization, which includes product management, design, user research and engineering. - To move from APM to PM, it is important to demonstrate an understanding of the product life cycle and the ability to launch features with limited help - Make sure you manager knows your contributions to the engineer and design teams. Be a leader or equal partner to them, as well as ensure that your contributions are adding value to the team and the product. - In order to become a senior PM, an IC needs to master the day-to-day product life cycle work and contribute to product strategy. This includes taking on more complex projects with more cross-functional stakeholders, larger product changes, more ambiguity, and bigger marketing moments, as well as making time for strategic work and demonstrating nuanced and structured thinking on complex decisions. - Becoming a principal PM is a difficult process that requires gaining a reputation as an industry expert, building trust with company leaders, contributing and influencing at the company level and finding mission-critical PM roles that require principal level skills. Even if it does not involves having direct reports, you need to prove that your skills worth the cost. - In order to become a director, it is important to build a high performing team by hiring well, coaching, training and allocating people appropriately. Additionally, a director is expected to drive operational excellence and create innovative and impactful multi-team strategies and ensure the strategies are successfully implemented - When hiring a head of product, companies will assess the candidate’s experience, philosophy, and autonomy. They need to have a successful track record, philosophies that align with company values, and the ability to manage teams and create strategies autonomously.