What is my ideal Career Path for Product Managers - Chapter 1
This is a three chapter journey where we will talk about Product Management Career Path.
Hi readers, my name is Michel Hauzeur, and I am a soccer lover and a father of my little warriors called Mila, Maya, and Baloo (rescued dog)
Currently Product Design & Innovation Leader at Nearsure with 14+ years of experience in product & tech. I’m also a Co-founder of La corte de los Búhos, a Growth consulting company in Latam, and a Gamification consultant.
Mentor in the Product League and Product Makers Mentors program for 2+ years.
And 2023 Product-Led Alliance Award as Product Leader of the Year winner.
These are the three chapters:
Chapter 1: The Career Path Framework
Chapter 2: The Career Path Skills
Chapter 3: How to apply this framework
Chapter 1 - The Career Path Framework
Section 1: How Everything Starts
I started my journey 14+ years ago as a Project Manager, where I learned how technology works. For around five (5) years, I worked on projects for digital products, platform implementations and migrations, server migrations, and legal implementations, among others.
When I moved to Product, I was grateful that as a Project Manager, I learned about delivery, facilitation, and management. From my point of view, this was a perfect start to becoming a Product Manager, not because it was my journey but because it let me learn about how teams, roles, responsibilities, due dates, timelines, among other things, really work.
As a Product Manager, I first learned about the importance of accountability and ownership, which I didn´t do much as a project manager. Then, I started learning more about the role by taking individual courses, and then I took a master's to learn about the basic knowledge like:
Product management
Lean, Agil, and System Design Thinking
Innovation through Experimentation
Business Analytics for Data-Driven Decision Making
Strategic Social Media Marketing
Platform Strategy
Digital Transformation
Leading in the Digital Age
It was amazing for me to touch on some topics like design, data, and marketing as an owner for the first time.
Then, I started learning more about Strategy, Negotiation, how to Build Digital Products, Service Design, Adoption vs. Appropriation, Go-to-Market, Product-Led Growth, Data Science, Gen AI, and now Gamification.
I love to play between theory and tactical implementations, and that is how I have had the chance to lead product teams and design teams and help other product leaders transition into a product mindset.
Section 2: The Career Path Framework
Based on this experience and talking with dozens of Product Managers or candidates who are aspiring to become Product Managers, I understand that my experience is similar to that of others. When I shared my thoughts about the ideal PM Career Growth Path and put into practice the Product Assessment I developed, it made total sense the growth path thinking to build.
It has been more than three years since I started developing the Product Assessments, Processes, Career Paths, and Product Templates, and in the last three months, I decided to create this framework to help everyone on their journey.
To explain this framework better, let´s take a look at the following graphic:
In this graphic, you will see two Growth Path Pyramiths, one focused on stages (Left) and the other based on Strategic focus (Right).
So, how can you read each pyramid?
First, you need to understand how the structure works. The Growth Path Pyramid (Left) starts with a Base or first level, called Product Development; the Second Level is Product Design, the Third Level is Product Strategy, the Fourth Level is Product GTM (Go-To-Market), and on the Top is Product Growth.
But what does each level mean?
First Level - Product Development: The foundation phase focused on building the product management and facilitation, implementing features, and ensuring functionality.
Secondo Level - Product Design: Focuses on creating user-friendly interfaces and experiences, enhancing product usability.
Third Level. - Product Strategy: Setting long-term goals, understanding the why, researching and validation, defining product vision, and aligning with business objectives. Check out my Understand the Why template here or Vision + Customer Journey template here:
Fourth Level - Product GTM (Go-To-Market): Encompasses planning and executing product launches, marketing strategies, technical deployment, product support, pricing, business model, community engagement, timeline, experiments, and sales approaches. Check out my GTM template here.
Fith Level—Product Growth: This level focuses on scaling the product, expanding the user base, and maximizing its market potential. In this phase, we focus on continuous discovery, hacking growth strategies like conversion rate optimization, gamification, or personalization, and business approaches like Product-Led Growth or Product-Led Sales. Check out my talk about gamification here.
But why did I design the structure like this?
Before jumping into the details, let´s discuss the Strategic Focus Pyramid (Right). From now on, we will talk about the following structure:
Delivery (Base): Combines Product Development and Design, emphasizing the execution and creation of the product.
Strategy (Upper Levels): Encompasses Product Strategy, GTM, and Growth, focusing on high-level decision-making and market positioning.
Delivery - Strategic Focus Pyramid (Right)
Product Development:
To grow as a Product Manager, first, you need to learn how a product works, how it´s built, how to talk, negotiate, and facilitate stakeholders, how to build a user story, how to implement agile frameworks, how to iterate, define sprints and a roadmap, deliver a product into the market, support and maintain it, and align the team along roadmap, design, and development.
This is the breakpoint at which to start building the product. For me, it was the best stage of my experience, and it´s because while you are building, you are learning, failing, improving, and setting up the baseline for your future career.
Product Design:
Once you have enough experience developing a product, jump into design directly. Learn about how a product is designed, how UX is built, how a UI is created, how to research market and user, the importance of service design for your product and company, and how to visualize data.
My breakpoint was once I changed my title from Project to Product Management. I started learning about UX/UI, Adoption vs Appropriation, and Service Design because I felt it was right. I also started improving my communication with the design team, users, and stakeholders. And it worked.
Note 1:
Before proceeding to the Product Strategy level, it is important to note that Product Managers come from different backgrounds; some have Project Management, Design, or development backgrounds.
Considering this, I suggest that you start in a Product Development phase and then move into Product design. But if you are a Product Designer, learn about product development well before moving into Product Strategy.
Strategy- Strategic Focus Pyramid (Right)
Product Strategy:
You will know that you are ready to jump into Product Strategy once you feel you have created a roadmap to prioritize it, detail it into user stories, divide it into sprints, define and design it into feature or user flows, develop it into iterations, launch it, train the stakeholders, follow metrics, and maintain it. Most importantly, you fail and learn from it.
Let´s talk now about Product Strategy. This is where the years of experience developing and designing a product start making total sense.
At the delivery stage (Product Development and Design), a Product Manager focuses on making a definition made by the CPO, VP, Director, Head, Lead, or Senior Product Manager into a real product.
Now is the time for you to go further and start defining the future of your product.
So, the best way to start working on the strategy side is to learn about problem-solving, improve your research, define your hypothesis creation, user, market, pricing validation, vision co-creation, prototyping and testing, OKR definition, the strategy itself, and product download, based on roadmap and backlog definition.
How do you start? I suggest first understanding your team's background and seniority. Not everything needs to be on your shoulders. If you know you have a strong UX researcher or UX/UI, you can support some tasks in this role, such as the developer, data, and QA.
Product GTM (Go-to-Market):
As Product Managers, we have started working on Go-to-Market through Product Development. But it is usual in most companies that you delegate this task to the Marketing team without asking.
Learning to be in charge of product launches at this specific level is important. This means planning the marketing definitions, brand values, experimental tests, control group launches, support and training, data metrics, community creation, launch timeline, pricing, and business model.
This doesn´t mean that you will do it alone; it means that you will work with all your stakeholders, dealing with all their needs and requirements, among other things, and managing the pace to launch a successful product.
Don´t worry if you mess it up—we all have been there. It would be best if you kept getting better and watching the numbers.
Product Growth):
Finally, we reached the last level!
At this point, you will be ready to think about the future of your product! I think I am at this level, and it is amazing how you combine everything you have learned in the past and put all that experience into practice to think only about growth.
A great way to start is by reading Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis; this book will give you the best introduction, description, process, and starting point. Then, you can learn about experimentation by reading Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres. This book gives you the best approach to approaching problems, defining desired outcomes, identifying opportunities, and starting to experiment until you reach desirable results.
Once you understand Acquisition, Onboarding, Adoption, and Expansion, you can dive deep into each phase and learn about Conversion Rate Optimization, Product-Led Growth, and Gamification, among other things.
But this doesn´t end here; this is about iterating, experimenting, learning, reaching outcomes, and setting up desired outcomes again.
Celebrating Hallowing with my family dressed as Frozen!
Section 3: What´s next!
First, I invite you to continue reading Chapter 2, where I explain “The Career Path Skills.” This chapter covers eleven (11) hard and six (6) soft skills.
Second, I invite you to reread it and validate your growth path status based on the below-mentioned levels. Once you do it, wait for chapter two and identify your missing skills.
Thanks for following me, and keep reading!!
Next topics I will be writing about:
What is my ideal Career Path for Product Managers - Chapter 2
What is my ideal Career Path for Product Managers - Chapter 3
How does gamification impact business results?
What are the behavior core drives that gamification tries to work with?
The relation between gamification and personalization.
The relation between gamification and Product-Led Growth.
There are four pillars on which a marketplace should be built.
Wait for more…
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