Throughout my career I have always been working towards the next step in the ladder. I always had a clear vision of what I would like the next step to be. However since my promotion to Product Manager I have found myself wondering what goal I would like to chase next and finding myself without an answer.
I’ve been finding this feeling to be somewhat unsettling and alien to me. Perhaps this is a natural position to find oneself in after forging a career for ten years. I graduated with a politics degree and fully intended to enter politics by working for an MP or a think tank. Purely by chance I ended up taking a temporary role in the NHS before then finding a job at the company I am now at in Customer Success. After a few years in that role I then moved over to Product Management. Throughout that time I always had the next role in mind and what skills I needed to enhance to get that role.
This time things feel different. I no longer have that singular focus that I once had. Sure, the logical next step is to continue climbing the product management career path as a senior product manager or group product manager. In all likelihood that’s exactly what I will end up doing as I love my job, but the desire to do so feels different. I have no desire to change roles but without a concrete goal to chase I feel like there’s also a risk of drifting into mediocrity.
Breaking into product management required me to learn a bunch of things I had limited or no experience of previously. Now that I am a product manager, progression needs to be defined differently. Now its less abut the next role and more about refining and enhancing the skills I have already learned. I’m decent at public speaking, managing internal and external stakeholders, writing features and doing research and so on. I also wouldn’t be so arrogant as to suggest I have mastered or come close to mastery on any of those skills either.
The way I think about career progression needs to change from being role focused to skill focused. I need to spend some time thinking about which skills I am weaker at and which skills I enjoy to help me determine what I want to do next. There’s a whole host of things I enjoy about my role but there’s also a bunch of things I enjoy a lot less which I tend to avoid doing where I can. Perhaps the right thing to do here is to lean into the things I avoid doing where I can so that I become more well-rounded.
There’s a wide variety of different product managers and the discipline itself is seeing an ever-growing number of specialisations. If there are aspects of my role that I don’t enjoy, would seeking out one of those specialisations mean I can focus on the things I enjoy more and less on the things I don’t like?
A paradigm shift from being role focused to being skill focused is how I climb that next mountain in my career.
Tom
