The PM Mindset Ladder
PM ladders (and career ladders in general) tend to elicit a lot of feelings. To some they are an obstacle course to navigate. To others they are a playbook for how to play the game. They can be hard to interpret, but if you look past the hard skills (the what) and the soft skills (the how) and translate them into plain English (vs jargon), you can actually have a thoughtful career planning conversation.
Below is my mental mapping for how PMs evolve, which is more oriented towards the mode they operate in.
You can see the breadth of mindsets here ranges from “ship feature” to “forecast market”, and there’s room here for all levels ranging from APM to CPO. Some examples of what a PM ladder overlaid on this framing could look like:
APM -> PM -> Sr. PM -> Staff / Principal PM -> Director -> VP -> CPO
PM I -> PM II -> Sr. PM -> Group PM -> Dir -> Sr. Dir -> VP -> SVP -> EVP
The simple leveling translation I use:
can you ship?
can you contextualize?
can you manage a portfolio?
can you move business…
