What separates senior from junior PMs

I love rubrics¹ , but if I had to simplify, great PMs deliver impact in highly ambiguous and noisy situations, and junior PMs get stuck.

At the APM and PM level, it’s all about execution: give them the problem, give them a hypothesis for the solution, and they can do some basic discovery to find the answer and build it. Stakeholder needs are easy to meet, and there aren’t a ton of distractions. It’s basic product delivery.

At the SPM level, there’s a little more ambiguity and noise. The problem space is given to them but the exact problem isn’t, the solution space takes some discovery and iteration, and the execution is pretty straightforward once the pieces are lined up. Stakeholders are a bit more opinionated because the stakes are higher, and as a more senior person, you’re fielding more distractions² .

At the Lead and Principal levels, you’re tackling situations that could unlock big value but nothing is easy and failure is possible. You’re given a desired business outcome and have to find a big enough customer problem that, if solved successfully, would deliver that business outcome. No one knows if it’s possible, but everyone has opinions. The stakes are high, and if you succeed, you can have huge impact on the valuation and future of the business.

I’m sharing this for two reasons. For managers: does the level of your team talent match the problems you are asking them to solve? It could be they need more scaffolding, that you have a Lead level problem but only a PM available. You’ll need to step in and help them solve it.

For ICs: if you’re looking for promotion, focus on success given ambiguity and noise. Give your manager and leadership team more reasons to hand you difficult, messy, higher stakes opportunities. “I got this.” Then, deliver.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

Warning: old man shakes fist at sky incoming.

Here’s an except from a comment in r/ProductManagement: I have started to build the strategy on my own since it doesn’t take that long. Different Canvases and Opportunity solution tree work wonders with chatgpt to get clear vision.

The ChatGPT inclusion is what makes me shake my head in “get off my lawn” wonder and annoyance. It got me wondering if a whole generation of younger PMs and founders are going to lean on LLMs for creating vision and strategy docs.

It’s hard for me to fathom that the LLM content is actually innovative or logically rigorous. But maybe I’m the old man complaining about kids using calculators in school, or about people not knowing how to drive manual transmission cars, or about not knowing how to fix things around the house.

Has anyone used these tools for vision and/or strategy documents? Are they any good?

1  Rubrics make clear to people what competencies are expected at each career level. It’s a spreadsheet with competences as rows down the left side, and job levels as columns to the right. Each cell is a number 1-5, which signals how good one should be at that competency for that job level. We realized at The Knot that numbers was better than yes/no checkboxes because people were mistakenly thinking “I did this once” was sufficient to make the case for promotion.

2  “Good PM, Bad PM” is my go to on distractions, still relevant even though it’s almost 30 years old. Basically, it’s a PMs job to always know what their most important problem to solve is, and prioritize their time to making proactive progress on solving that problem. Everything else — operational issues, status updates, stakeholder demands, bugs that come in, QA’ing features — gets triaged, some of it done and some of it deprioritized. Every junior PM complains about how busy they are and never have time to do any strategic work. And yet somehow, experienced PMs figure it out. Some of it is being able to do the reactive work faster thanks to experience, and some of it is being more able to realize what work isn’t worth the time right now.