Note: To use the career reflection section, you need to duplicate this page.

While filling out the section, remember to be honest with yourself and where you are currently at with your journey.

Introduction

The Product Manager (PM) role is an interdisciplinary role with responsibilities that cut across leadership, strategy, design, business, sales, marketing, customer success and every other business arm involved in building and/or maintaining a successful product.

As Product Managers grow within a company, their skills & competencies especially in terms of how they are delivering on their responsibilities may improve. Hence, it becomes necessary to map out the Product Manager's career path and give the opportunity for reflection to ensure they are still on the right path.

The Product Manager Career Path

The Product Manager career path can be subdivided into two product career tracks;

• The Individual Contributor track: An individual contributor is a member of an organization who does not have any people management responsibilities. Instead, they independently contribute to the organisation's goals.
• The Management track: An individual on the management track gets to manage other members of the organization. They lead and oversee a team's effort to achieve organisational goals.

The two career tracks differ when it comes to the management of other people.

At the beginning of a PM's career, the roles can be said to overlap on both the individual contributor track and management track.

However, at some point in the career path of a product manager, the PM gets to decide whether he/she would like to take on management responsibilities (in terms of managing other team members) or not.

The company also can determine whether a PM should grow into the individual contributor track or the management track based on a PM's competency, skills, and core values.

As the company grows, it becomes important to adequately classify PMs into roles that fit their competencies and individual career choices.

Here is the product manager career path.

Phase 1: Junior Product Manager

Phase 2: Product Manager