Why we need Staff Product Managers

Our product and development teams here at commercetools have doubled in size over the last year, and we plan to continue to grow. This growth means that new product domains and a multi-level org structure have become a natural necessity for us. However, staying lean and agile is as important. That is why we need to have a comprehensive and varied structure of roles, not only to address these needs, but also to support different career tracks someone may want to take in product management at commercetools.

Product managers across all levels have to demonstrate a skill set grounded on 3 wide pillars: Knowledge of their Domain, Product Vision and Strategy, and People Skills. When I joined commercetools as a Product Manager one year ago, my first impression was that career paths within product management were somewhat standard. A year later, this initial view has fundamentally changed, and things look entirely different from my new vantage point and role as a Staff Product Manager.

Product Management Core Skill Set

Craftsmanship means being able to define your product’s vision, turn it into a strategy, all the way down to a product backlog and manage the delivery. However, what is key here is the ability to tell your product’s story. Making sure you can always define, justify and message your product’s impact, while shaping its scope and delivery is extremely important, and this input will define and empower your go-to-market and product marketing strategy.

Domain and Market Knowledge means understanding what your product does, who the main users are, and how the competition and industry landscape look like. A substantial part of this pillar includes being able to closely collaborate with product marketing, sales, and go-to-market teams to define the customer segments and key metrics to measure your product’s success.

People Skills and servant leadership. In other words, being ready to assist others before themselves and understanding this will ultimately help everyone achieve success. PMs need to be able to inspire and influence their teams, customers, and partners internally and externally. Building a product was never and will never be a one-person show. Products are living organisms; therefore, continuous feedback and customer insights are the oxygen they need to grow and mature.

PM Levels and the Staff PM Role

The level of skills demonstrated in each of the above pillars is what eventually defines a PM’s level of seniority, and from a point onwards, their chosen career track and form of impact.

When starting a career in product management, the pretty standard path would be:

Junior Product Manager -> Product Manager-> Senior Manager.

Transitioning across these three levels, which is usually the general norm, means an individual will go through different stages of cognition, from being aware [junior PM] to deeply understanding [PM] and eventually to making base investment decisions for the team [Senior PM].

As mentioned, the above 3 levels are pretty common across product companies. However, beyond that point, a product manager starts facing the dilemma of ‘where to go next’. The more someone grows professionally, the more they focus on strategic decision-making and operational activities and people management. Still, not all PMs may want to invest in the people management track after becoming a senior manager. Another option could be to become the subject matter expert on a specific product area.

For that reason, here at commercetools, we introduced a new role as part of our overall levelling process; the Staff Product Manager role.

Staff Product Managers have the highest rank in the ‘expert’ track. In addition to all the responsibilities a senior PM has, Staff PMs are responsible for defining the product vision and strategy of a solution or go-to-market motion in collaboration with Product Leadership, and coordinating work across multiple product teams. As such, the decisions of Staff PMs will lead to more time and monetary investments, higher risks but also higher rewards, and product impact. More precisely, going back to the 3 core pillars described above, here’s how things shift

Craftsmanship:

• Communicate goals across teams, negotiate timelines and roadmap, follow up on delivery;
• Propose launch plans, packaging, and pricing;
• Identify product strengths and differentiators;

Domain and Market Knowledge:

• Analyze market trends, research competitors and define how to react to them in their domain;
• Identify key value drivers for targeted customer segments;
• Be the go-to person for other products in your area of focus

People Skills:

• Be recognised as the subject matter expert in their domain across the organisation and share their knowledge
• Communicate product vision and strategy with externals and across teams
• Facilitate collaboration between external stakeholders and other PMs;

Of course, it can be the case that a PM wants to focus and grow more on developing people skills and manage a specific product group (i.e., group of PMs). In that case, and subject to organizational design, they could follow the Head of Product career track. A Head of Product is responsible for defining the strategy and vision for a specific product group, in collaboration with the group’s PMs and UX, as well as coaching and line managing the previously mentioned PM roles.

Why we need both — Staff PMs and Head of Product

But why are both roles (Staff PM and Head of Product) needed, and how are they different?

When a product company massively scales like commercetools, it becomes almost impossible for one person to simultaneously manage all the PMs in their group, the product group’s motions, and its overall strategy and vision. As such, subject matter experts on specific product motions who work very closely with the Head of Product help keep the balance within a product group whilst they are dedicated to a specific team within the group. In other words, Staff PMs belong to a dedicated product team rather than sitting across multiple ones.

While Staff PMs do not entail direct people responsibilities, in the sense of direct management, they do require high communication skills and a leadership mindset as they significantly influence the overall product roadmap. On the other hand, the Head of each product group enables and coaches the PMs across that group to define its holistic strategy and vision.

Takeaway

Becoming a Staff PM means you never stop honing your skill set around your product’s vision, strategy and market knowledge. Because Staff PMs do not coordinate direct reports, they have more time to focus on decisions that can and will significantly impact the product’s evolution. In addition, their interactions with other PMs will naturally take the form of ongoing coaching to help PMs develop their core skills further.

And last but not least, I’m happy to report it’s all worth it. :)

Thanks to Maria Galan, Alistair Groves and Andrea Stubbe for their valuable feedback