Getting Promoted to Director
Read on my website / Read time: 5 minutes
Getting promoted to Director is one of the most common questions I get. Small wonder: it's one of the hardest leaps to make.
It sounds sexy, right? In a Director role, you have the opportunity to generate outsized impact. You are considered a member of the management and leadership team. You have the opportunity to impact product, process, and people. And it's a key stepping stone to getting into an executive role.
Plus, you get paid more. And who doesn't want to get paid more?
Title. Prestige. Money. Respect. Nice.
So why is it so hard to get?
You may be working in a senior product manager role for many years. You believe you're a product management expert. You've had a number of successes. You're well respected in your company. You're excellent with customers. You can craft product strategy, prioritize, write requirements, work with engineering and design, and launch products better than anyone. You get 5 stars or Very Strong or Exceeds Expectations in every performance review. You may have even mentored a few product managers on the way.
Yet, you're facing a roadblock getting to the next level. What's it going to take?
It's not uncommon for an overly-ambitious senior PM to get fed up and look for Director opportunities at other companies.
Only to find it can be difficult to get the job without already having done it. Catch-22.
Or to actually get the job and have reality smack them in the face as they suddenly realize the enormity of a job they're ill-prepared for.
Director fail.
Unfortunately, getting to Director is also one of the easiest to screw up. Both by the individual newly promoted to Director and by the organization promoting the individual to the Director level.
I was once hired into a company to replace their existing PM Director. They had promoted one of their Senior Product Managers to the Director role because they considered him the most experienced and best PM on the team. The Sr PM naturally grabbed the chance, like anyone would.
Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do the job. And the company had failed to set to right expectations or properly set him up for success. The end result was they let him go.
The reality is when the Director fails, it's the individual who gets the cut, not the person who promoted them into the role.
Not Super PM.
It's not uncommon for a strong individual contributor product manager to get promoted to the Director role before they're ready.
They step into the role and it swallows them. The scope and scale is so much more than when they were an individual contributor. They realize the job goes well beyond just product development and managing a team of direct reports. And expectations are 10x more.
Often they'll act as "super PMs". This is natural, because it's where they're most comfortable.
They'll wade into every product decision. They'll review every backlog. They'll constantly overrule their PMs' prioritization. They'll sit in on every meeting between their PMs and Engineering teams. And they'll get frustrated if their PMs don't PM the way they used to.
As a result, their PMs get frustrated and look for greener pastures.
Compounding this is that it's not uncommon for a company to expect them to act as super PMs. This happens when the company is unclear on what it needs from the PM Director role - because the company has never had true product management leadership.
So, if this is a role you're aspiring to, or one you're currently in, it's important to understand what it takes.
What a Director of Product Management does.
Becoming a Director of Product Management is not a natural progression from being an individual contributor senior product manager. It's a totally different job. You're moving from a maker job to a manager job. You do less building and more process and people management.
Directors of Product Management work on a different set of problems than individual contributor product managers. Their primary responsibility is the PROCESS and PEOPLE of product management.
Their focus is on providing order and structure, and keeping things directionally on track. They work to standardize execution and dismantle organizational roadblocks. It is primarily an operational job.
A Director role is classic middle management, sandwiched between individual contributors and senior management.
The role involves 5 areas of responsibility:
- Ensuring the right process is in place to enable the right product ideas to get to customers quickly.
- Managing and mentoring their team.
- Dismantling roadblocks to enable execution of the product roadmap.
- Smoothing people issues.
- Liaising with executive management.
Let's discuss each.
1. Process
PM Directors manage the business operations of product management:
- Collaborating with R&D to standardize product development processes and reporting.
- Collaborating with Marketing and other departments to standardize launch processes and reporting.
- Building launch teams.
- Standardizing the roadmap prioritization process.
- Tracking and reporting on key metrics.
2. Team
This is classic team management.
- Set product-line level execution plans and resource allocation.
- Balancing staff assignments and priorities.
- Keeping a pulse on team morale. Keeping engagement high.
- Being a mentor to help develop PM, leadership, or other skills.
- Encouraging smart risk-taking.
- Weighing in on product decisions only to settle disputes or demonstrate technique.
- Being an advocate for the team. Defending it when necessary.
In other words, being a good boss.
3. Roadblocks
This is a big part of a Director's job. The PM Director is responsible for ensuring the smooth execution of the product roadmap. So they're constantly identifying and removing obstacles that get in the way of that.
This could be anything from...
organizational inefficiencies (having every product decision run through Legal is slowing things down)...
to conflicting priorities (highlighting trade-offs)
to people issues (Jill on my team isn't getting along with John on your team)...
to resource issues (advocating upper management for additional resources)...
to aligning incentives (my team's goals aren't aligned with your team's goals)...
to anything else that may adversely affect successful roadmap execution.
A significant part of this is relentlessly presenting the product strategy, roadmap, and process to other departments to promote understanding of what product management is doing.
4. People
This is another huge aspect of the Director role. Many newly minted Directors are surprised at how much time this takes up.
This involves:
- Fostering, encouraging, coaxing cross-functional cooperation.
- Aligning incentives to enable collaboration.
- Modeling good behavior for their peers and others.
- Resolving people issues.
- Cooling down egos.
The key to this is building strong working relationships with fellow Directors in other departments, which allow them to discuss people issues in a trustful way.
For example, a good Director may highlight the work of an individual in another department. ("My PMs love working with Angela. She's always so collaborative and team-oriented.") It also gives them the credibility for unpleasant discussions. ("When Sameer shares a customer request, he is extremely demanding and heavily critical of the team if they don't prioritize his request immediately. Frankly, my PMs don't want to work with him anymore.")
5. Executive Liaison
A Director role is a highly visible role. It involves frequent interactions with upper management and even exposure to senior executives.
- Presenting current and future product plans and status.
- Highlighting obstacles with options and recommendations to remove.
- Escalating critical roadblocks.
- Elevating resource issues.
- Collaborating on developing the broader product strategy.
- Presenting and gaining approval for operational plans to execute on the product strategy - resourcing, budget, etc.
- Leading a cross-functional initiative or task force that has executive visibility and sponsorship.
Why a Director role opens up
3 conditions need to exist in order for a Director role to become available:
1. There's a need.
This could be a strategic need, such as the company is enjoying major growth resulting in expansion of the product portfolio and product team. Or perhaps the company is investing in some new market or technology and needs a Director to lead the team.
It could be a capacity need - the current PM team needs a day-to-day manager.
2. There's an expected outcome.
Like any job, a Director role is an a human resources investment – and an expensive one.
It's not just the salary, which is 6 figures. It's also everything else – benefits, supplies and equipment, SW licenses, all of it. Once you add all that, the actual cost an be as high as $340,000. And that doesn't even include stock options.
It's also a FIXED COST – the company has to pay it no matter what at the same rate every time.
And keep in mind that the other departments are competing for these same dollars.
So the role needs to be justified by some quantifiable outcome, such as greater productivity or efficiency, higher employee engagement, faster speed to market, customer success, or revenue.
3. It’s budgeted.
Even if there's a need and an expected outcome, the role needs to be budgeted. If there's no budget for the role, it doesn't exist.
How to become a Director
Absent special circumstances, your path to Director is going to be blocked until your current manager is promoted.
So you want to set yourself up to "fill the hole" long before your manager moves on. You do this by building the right relationships and looking for activities that improve your management and leadership skills in a very visible way. Do not circumvent your current boss.
A big part of getting promoted, especially to senior management and executive roles, is proving you can already do the job.
Here are 8 things you can do:
- Share your career aspirations with your boss. Do this humbly, but forthrightly.
- Understand what it means to be a PM Director. As we've discussed, it's a completely different job than an individual contributor product manager.
- Find out what it means to be a Director at your current company. A promotion is specific to that organization.
- Ask for opportunities to be mentored and coached up. Learn to take feedback well. Put your ego aside.
-
Are there tasks and areas of work you could take off your boss's plate? Are there elements of the role that you could safely start taking on to showcase your ability to step up into the bigger role?
- For example, you could mentor one of the junior PMs.
- You could collaborate with your Director on staff and team assignments and priorities.
- Up-level a competitive analysis from a feature comparison to market positioning.
- Take the lead on some cross-functional initiative or task force, freeing up your Director from one more committee and boosting your visibility.
- Take ownership of the operational success of an aspect of the product development process.
- Up-level a development estimation to a cost analysis or even an ROI or revenue estimation analysis.
- Provide material input into pricing strategy.
- Demonstrate that you can do these things while also doing your current role.
- Build strong relationships with cross-functional Directors. You want them to eventually start thinking of you as a potential peer.
- Build a strong relationship with your skip level - i.e., your boss's boss. You want them to know you and trust you, because ultimately they're the ones who will have to either approve or get approval for your promotion.
When your boss gets promoted or moves on, you want to be in a position where they're recommending you as the best candidate to take their job.
When your boss moves on, your skip level goes from one job to three jobs: their existing job, filling in for your boss, and hiring a replacement - three pressing tasks. Ideally, you're the first person that comes to mind as the perfect replacement.
If a new Director opportunity opens, you want your boss to feel comfortable thinking of you as a peer and your skip level to feel confident that you'll be an asset as a member of the management team and a new direct report.
Summary
In order to get to the next level, it's not just enough to perfect your product manager skills. You want to always be working on your NEXT set of skills.
It can feel like things aren't happening fast enough, but remember that careers are decades long.
If you stay where you are you probably have a couple of years for both promotions - your manager and then you - to happen.
If you move to another company, you will need to re-prove yourself, which will also take time.
In either cases, the skills you build will set you up for a future when you find yourself in a high-growth situation.
