Navigating Your Product Management Journey: Level Up Your Career
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Chapter 1: Understanding Product XP
Your career in product management shares surprising similarities with the mechanics of role-playing games (RPGs).
In RPGs, the key to unlocking new skills and rewards lies in accumulating experience points (XP) through various quests and challenges. When mentoring product managers about career advancement, I often notice a tendency to focus more on the prestige of the companies they aspire to join (like Big Tech) rather than the type and quality of experiences necessary for genuine growth. A useful framework to visualize your journey in product management is the RPG model, which helps you identify essential quests to undertake for progress.
"In many RPGs, characters begin as relatively weak and untrained. When enough experience is gained, the character 'levels up,' reaching a new stage of development. This event often enhances the character's attributes and may enable the acquisition of new skills or the enhancement of existing ones. Leveling up can also grant access to more challenging areas or items." — Wikipedia: Experience point
Product management is a field where individuals come from diverse backgrounds, often starting with minimal hands-on experience. While you can accumulate experience over time in one role, this approach is inefficient. Genuine advancement occurs when you can rapidly gain varied experiences. This principle applies whether you aim to be an individual contributor, a leader, or a blend of both. (Though this notion is relevant across disciplines, I will focus on product management here.)
Many newcomers transition into product management by leveraging their expertise in a specific domain. I can relate, as I originally trained as a neuroscientist. After obtaining two degrees and publishing several research papers, I realized that a research career wasn't for me. I made a drastic, unplanned shift, relocating to a new country and landing my first tech role at a small analytics startup in London as their second employee. This opportunity allowed me to utilize my scientific knowledge and become the company's inaugural product manager.
For a long time, I believed that my scientific background was my greatest asset in product management. However, reflecting on my journey years later (now serving as VP of Product at Lyst, a fashion e-commerce platform frequented by over 160 million shoppers globally), I recognize that the quality of experiences I've gathered has been more instrumental in my development than merely possessing domain knowledge. Regardless of the company or sector, key skills such as extracting clarity from chaos, mitigating risks through exploration, prioritizing effectively, executing plans, fostering alignment, and guiding teams toward success are universally valued.
I firmly believe that addressing gaps in your product management experiences can help you identify what aspects you enjoy most and ultimately develop a well-rounded skill set. To acquire the experiences necessary for advancement in your desired role (e.g., Senior, Director, VP, CPO, etc.), you need to pinpoint your "key missions."
Choosing Your Key Missions
Your product CV should reflect a tapestry of challenges you've tackled, rather than just a list of companies and industries. Like an RPG character, you must navigate various challenges to enhance your capabilities and climb the ladder. Unlike video games, which offer guided experiences, you must chart your own course in your career.
Here’s a suggested list of "key missions" that are beneficial for individual contributors throughout their product careers. Even if you aim to specialize, having exposure to these experiences at least once can be advantageous. It's also assumed that successfully completing these missions will require leveraging core product skills such as customer insights, execution, strategy, and leadership. (For simplicity, I've excluded additional missions relevant to product leadership roles.)
- Deliver a prototype to validate that it addresses a real issue. Then, discard it and scale it properly.
- Implement a backend capability that supports a crucial business process or enhances a user-facing product (e.g., a vital data pipeline). Complete this end-to-end to understand its business impact.
- Launch and refine a feature for a mature product that has already achieved product-market fit.
- Launch and refine a feature for a large product (with shared ownership among several teams) that has reached product-market fit. Grasp the dependencies and facilitate team alignment.
- Create and optimize a product for internal users to boost operational efficiency. Bonus points if it becomes essential for a user-facing product.
- Develop and optimize a completely new user-facing product, handling everything from backend to frontend to design—essentially the whole process. Figure out how to achieve product-market fit.
- Repeat the above tasks while mentoring or managing another product manager.
Each CV will contain such experiences, but if you have only tackled one or two, you might encounter limitations in your career progression based on your aspirations.
Is There an Ideal Mission Sequence?
No single sequence is perfect, nor is the list exhaustive. Your opportunities will often be constrained by your current organization. However, you do have control over your willingness to change, whether it means switching teams or seeking new jobs.
A clearly defined company strategy and a robust product/engineering culture are crucial for obtaining specific experiences. Recognizing when these elements are present—and when they are not—is an important skill. Early in my career, I read Marty Cagan's book Inspired, which didn't resonate with me initially. It seemed like common sense at the time, but years later, after becoming a Head of Product, I reread it and saw that all the dysfunctions Cagan described were prevalent at my company. It was a clear signal that a change was needed. Real product work is often chaotic, and it's vital to discern when the experiences you're gathering at a particular organization are detrimental to your career by reinforcing poor practices or anti-patterns.
Some of the most accomplished product managers I've encountered have made it a habit to gain experience across different industries. Entering a new environment often grants them a unique perspective, enabling them to connect current challenges with past experiences in innovative ways, uncovering solutions that might not be apparent to those deeply entrenched in the field.
My own product career journey as an individual contributor has included various experiences, roughly following this sequence:
- Shipped numerous features for a small but mature product at my first startup.
- Implemented several new data pipelines and integrated them into existing products, unlocking valuable features for users.
- Learned effective discovery processes after hiring a UX designer.
- Developed completely new greenfield products for clients and redesigned a flagship product.
- Built tools to enhance (or eliminate) inefficient internal processes.
- Coached multiple product teams to achieve the earlier missions, including delivering personalized recommendation engines for large-scale products.
Are Any Missions More Valuable for Career Progression?
Some missions are indeed more beneficial! However, the key takeaway is that your CV should not reflect only one type of experience. Avoid pigeonholing yourself; instead, strive for a diverse portfolio. Additionally, as noted in the previous list, don’t shy away from “less glamorous” internal or platform projects; these can be just as impactful—or even more so—when it comes to delivering business value. Effectively communicating the business impact to your leadership is crucial.
Returning to the RPG analogy, side quests may not directly contribute to the main goal, but they provide experiences that can enhance skills or yield benefits later. Helping a villager find a lost child may not save the world, but the loyalty earned can tip the scales in crucial moments.
Don't Forget to Press Start
Recently, there has been considerable dialogue about the necessity of domain knowledge when hiring product managers. I wholeheartedly agree that product managers don't need extensive domain knowledge to be effective. While industry experience and technical expertise are undeniably valuable, they must be complemented by the essential traits of a good product manager: curiosity and a relentless drive to solve real-world problems. However, to effectively harness these qualities and advance in your product career, you must cultivate a diverse array of experiences.
If you wish to progress swiftly but haven't yet identified the "key missions" necessary for your next career level, you risk remaining stuck at the start screen. When opportunities arise to explore something completely new, what’s holding you back from diving in?
In this video, "How to Level Up XP FAST in Chapter 5! (XP Update Explained!)", you'll discover strategies to quickly accumulate experience points and advance your product management skills.
The video "Hay Day - XP / Experience (Guide)" offers insights on how to effectively manage your experience points and enhance your overall gameplay, applicable to your career journey as well.