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“It makes no sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do” — Steve Jobs

The leap from a product manager serving as an individual contributor to a Manager of PMs can be very challenging. and Casey Winters laid out the challenges in this great article: :
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In that article, they laid out four key transitions you need to make:
Depth in one type of product work → Breadth across multiple types of product work
Being good at your job → training others to be good at theirs
Solving with the resources you have → Solving by allocating resources and influencing others
Gaining more personal scope → Creating more scope for the organization

Principles

A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”
A manager of PMs needs to focus on:
Clear roles & responsibilities across the team so you can divide & conquer your way through the problem space.
Clear objectives that are tightly aligned with the company’s business so everyone knows what success & failure looks like.
Autonomy, mastery & purpose for everyone on the team (from )
Questions to constantly ask your team
Who are the customers, what are their problems, how are we solving them, what’s our unique value problem? Lean stack mindset.
Are the objectives clear? Does the impact matter?
What’s our secret? What makes us special/different? What moats with castles are we building?
How are we different?
How are we managing risks?
Viability - business success
Desirability - users will love it
Feasibility - developers can build it
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On Ownership (drafting)

DRAFTING

On Decisions

On Growth

As a leader of PMs you need to think about a PM’s career beyond your team and the company. It’s rare for the product they onboarded to or created to continue to present exactly the challenges and opportunities necessary for their growth. You either help them find the next best thing or someone else will...and it’s better for it to be you.
You should have honest conversations with your team members about their career goals. This should be both 1:1 and as a team.
What is the perfect environment for them? Do they see themselves as a founder or a CPO at a 10K+ Fortune 100 company?
NewCo - start their own company
From scratch
Through an incubator
YC
SomeoneElseCo - finding the right startup
Pitchbook - how much fuel do they have, what’s the quality of that fuel.
BigCo

References

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