Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader — Reforge

Solving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing others

Instead of focusing on titles, it is best to think about your role in terms of ownership, scope of product/solution, and influence.

You have to move beyond solving with the resources you have and begin to influence others in the org to solve problems outside your direct span of control. You need to start identifying the full set of things blocking your problem area, and influencing others in the org to do that work. In addition, rather than being given a set of resources, you b... See more

what gets you to a senior product manager, won’t make you successful as a product leader.

Depth in one type of product work → Breadth across multiple types of product work

Going from APM → PM → SPM, you can keep doing similar things with deeper sophistication, more subject matter expertise, and better execution. But continuing to pursue those things will actually get you stuck at the Product Lead transition and you'll never break through to the next level.

Not all product work is created equal. After initial product-market fit, there are four categories of product problems that need to be managed and sequenced:Feature Work - Creating and capturing value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.Growth Work - Creating and capturing value by accelerating adop... See more

you actually need to do the opposite and reduce your scope by shedding parts of your responsibility to enable new teams around them. This feels very counterintuitive after years of trying to gain additional scope. But the decision here is that you can either keep it all yourself and do a B job at it, or you can shed these areas to enable them to al... See more

There are four key transitions you need to make: Depth in one type of product work → Breadth across multiple types of product workBeing good at your job → training others to be good at theirsSolving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing othersGaining more personal scope → Creating more scope for the organizat... See more

Gaining more individual scope → Creating more scope for the org