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Product Manager Dual Path Career Ladder

This month we’ve shared resources about all things product leadership. That can be a great career choice if you enjoy managing products and leading people. What if you don’t mind working with people, but aren’t terribly crazy about managing people? Don’t worry, your career doesn’t have to stagnate. It’s becoming ever more common to have a dual path career ladder where you can advance into product leadership, or see continued responsibility managing products.

Product Management career ladders. One common reason people want to become a product manager is a desire for growth. That could mean growth in knowledge, growth in skills, growth in responsibilities and, let’s face it, growth in a paycheck. Chances are, you won’t be able to experience that growth if you stay in the same role year after year. That’s where the product management career ladder comes into play. Here’s a collection of resources from the Ultimate Guide to Product Management that explore what good career ladders should have, how you can best navigate them, and some examples of how some companies have crafted their product management career ladder.

(via @prodcollective)

The case for a dual Product Management career path. Many traditional organizations still see Product Management as an “intermediate step” toward general management. Product Managers feel that once nailing that role, there’s really no space to progress without becoming a people manager (a role in any shape or form where people management becomes the focus — rather than product work and leadership) Afonso Franco explains this is where a dual career path for product management and leadership can be helpful. 

(via @uxdesigncc)

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Is it time to have a conversation on whether ChatGPT / GPT4 is *actually* accurate? A quick story...

I recently hosted Laura Klein for a video chat. In preparation, I asked ChatGPT (GPT4) to summarize a YouTube video of her talk from a couple of years back at the Virtual edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference.

I first asked it if it could even do that sort of thing. It responded very confidently, "Yes, as an AI language model, I am able to watch YouTube videos and analyze their content to provide a summary of the information covered in the video. Please feel free to send me a YouTube link, and I would be happy to provide you with a summary of the video's key takeaways."

So I did. And then it gave me this summary -- of a talk given at some point (presumably) by Kevin Hale. It seems like a nice summary. The problem? The video I sent had *nothing* to do with Kevin Hale. He was not in the video whatsoever. I tried again with a video that’s been out for 3 years and got a similar result – a very confident response summarizing a video that had nothing to do with the one I prompted it to summarize.

I am still definitely a fan of ChatGPT and its potential use cases. And hey, I made a great Chicken Sausage Udon Noodle Soup earlier this week thanks to a recipe that it supplied me with after I prompted it with some ingredients I had on hand.

But I’ve been seeing people prompt ChatGPT with really important things – like asking it for medical advice, reviewing tax return information, and strategy-related advice at work. Especially when it comes to the important stuff… be really careful. It’s a good idea to not just blindly accept anything AI platforms tell you as fact. 

Why Atlassian has dual track product management career paths, and how they did it. It might appear the “right path” to take is to become a manager of product managers. But maybe, the biggest impact you can make for your career and at your company is constantly getting better at the thing you enjoy doing the most. Sherif Mansour explains how Atlassian separated the tracks into the craft of an individual contributor and the craft of a manager. Now, a move into management isn’t a “step up the ladder”, but a lateral move.

(via @sherifmansour)

Group Product Managers vs. Principal Product Managers. Are you interested in becoming a product manager or advancing your product management career? What are the long-term career tracks that are available for PMs? In researching the various product management tracks, you may have stumbled upon two engaging titles: the Group Product Manager and the Principal Product Manager. Both are higher on the PM food chain, but what exactly is the difference between the two? How do the roles and responsibilities differ? How do they align? Which track is right for you, given your skills and work preferences? Anthony Pellegrino provides answers to these questions.

(via @tryexponent)

These are my Principal PMs, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others. More and more companies adopt a dual-track product management career framework, where one can progress as an individual contributor beyond Senior Product Manager towards Principal PM. This breaks the tradition that forced you to go into management. But what’s expected of these novel “experienced individual contributors”? How can their impact still grow from additive to multiplier, but differently as they don’t manage other PMs? João Craveiro looks at what traditional and dual-track career paths look like and how individual contributors can have an outsized positive impact to multiple product areas and/or the Product function.

(via jpgcc)

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