Advancing your product career

For the past six months, I’ve been doing interviews with product people who successfully got promoted in their product career. My hypothesis was (and is) that gender plays a role in how you advance in your product career and also in how you experience your product roles.

I spoke to 25 people identifying female and 25 people identifying male about their stories and experiences around the context of their successful promotions. While all my interviews were with people who successfully got a promotion, it is pretty clear that what led to the promotion is not the same for women and men, however much we would all like to think it is.

My conversations confirmed a lot of my assumptions and also surfaced incredibly helpful stories around what has led to success in their product career for both women and men. I have recently shared a number of my findings so far with the ProductTank Cologne community. You can watch a recording of my talk here:

To summarize a few of those key talking points:

You have a lot of agency in advancing your career in product

Most of the bullet points below apply to both women and men if they want to successfully advance their career in product.

• It matters to have a positive relationship with the decision maker of your potential promotion. That usually is at a minimum your current manager, very often also their manager and in some organizations whole promotion decision committees. Part of your time should go into actively building those relationships. Ideally in a way that makes you contribute to their success. In product this typically means finding a good balance between building user value and delivering on business outcomes at the same time. But it also means building a functional human relationship with the people who can decide on your promotion. You want them to both like you as a human as well as appreciate you for the delivery of relevant outcomes.
• It helps to pick work that is strategically relevant and has high visibility in your organization (and the good news is you can always pick up conversations about strategy with the leadership team around you). If you want more tips on this, you can read my blog article on making product strategy even if there is no clear business strategy.
• It helps to pick the context of your organization wisely. Ideally join a growing organization and if you are female, then one that already has more than 30% female representation in their leadership team.
• You have full control over your own personal development. Even if there are no obvious career progression opportunities in your organization, everything you learn will be an asset for your career even if it only pays off once you apply for a job in a different organization. If you keep learning something new every week, those learnings will compound into meaningful personal growth and new opportunities for you.
• Once you do get promoted it’s really helpful to understand what blind spots you might have. Almost all of my interview partners laughed and shared some version of the “I had no idea what I was getting myself into” story when describing what it was first like to be in their new role – especially when this meant to go from individual contributor to somebody with people management responsibilities.
• You can get help and support from people in the kind of senior roles you would like to get to. And you can look for mentors or product coaches to intentionally build skills you may want so build or strengthen. Most of the senior product leaders I spoke with have a coach to support them in their roles.

So what is different for women in product?

According to the conversations I had with successful product leaders here are some themes I keep hearing:

• It is rare that women get a promotion without having taken intentional steps towards it. While I kept hearing from men that they were “surprised by a promotion offer”, I kept hearing from women that they made their promotion desire explicit and then had to “prove the required skills”. This is why my advice for women is to seek organizations that have clear role descriptions. It makes skill requirements transparent and creates a common standard for what is asked of a more senior product person or a product leadership role.
• It is more likely for women who had a female manager to get intentional support in their career – especially around successfully navigating your career as a female in Tech. I also heard from multiple men that they specifically felt supported and coached by a female manager. I’m looking forward to the results of my quantitative survey to confirm if the latter is statistically relevant or just something people mentioned because they knew I’m looking into the role of gender in connection to how people advance in their career.
• While both men and women mention “stakeholder management” as a challenge they are facing, the stories around this do have a different flavor. 76% of the women I spoke to mentioned stakeholder management as a challenge (compared to 45% of the men). But not in the same way. Men struggle e.g. with the different interests stakeholders represent or mention that their leadership role “feels political”. But women mention the additional challenge to not be respected and trusted in their decisions and contributions. They keep having to justify decisions and proposals when those of their male peers get a lot less scrutiny.
• A good number of female product leaders shared stories of how unpleasant it was to work with a “typical tech bro” in the leadership team of their organization. While some men also transparently shared that a contributing factor to their promotion was their ability to be a “good buddy” with the male decision makers (e.g. partying together, staying out late, sharing the same humor, etc…).

After interviewing quite a few people on this topic I got to confirm that things are not exactly the same for women and men in advancing in their career in product. And things are certainly not the same with how people experience what challenges them in their senior product role. But both men and women share a lot of the same topics when it comes to what they enjoy about a senior product role. Both genders mention role modeling, mentoring, coaching, people development, problem solving, creativity, working strategically and the impact their products have as sources of joy in their work. So while we definitely have some work to do to make a career in product as likely for everyone regardless of their gender, there are also a lot of things we jointly struggle with or enjoy in our product careers.

I mentioned the quantitative survey I am looking to collect answers to. If you subscribe to my blog (or happen to get this one article forwarded) and you work in product. I’d love to have you respond to this survey and ideally share it with a few more product people in your network. I want to collect a few hundred responses to have statistically relevant results.

My goal with all of this is to create a more fair and fun way for women and men to navigate a successful career in product. For the women in product to have more fair access to opportunities and for the men in product to learn how they can help fostering product cultures that are inclusive to everyone.

As every month, I will also host a product salon on the topic of advancing your career in product. If will take place on June 10th at 6pm CET and you can sign up here.

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If you would like to explore this more: reach out for a free coaching session with me.
I coach, speak, do workshops and blog about #leadership, #product leadership, #AIEthics #innovation, the #importance of creating a culture of belonging and how to succeed with your #hybrid or #remote teams.

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