The Hardest Part of the Promotion Isn't the New Title

The problem with being good at the job

As a Senior PM, I had strong instincts. After years building NLP and analytics products, I knew what good discovery looked like, what made a roadmap defensible, when to push back on engineering timelines and when to let it go. Those instincts were reliable — and they were mine.

The first few months of managing a team, I kept reaching for those instincts in the wrong moments. A PM on my team would bring me a problem they were working through, and I'd quickly land on what I would do. I'd share it. Confidently. I thought I was being helpful.

What I was actually doing was taking the thinking away from them.

The instinct to solve is almost reflexive when you've been good at solving. The challenge of managing PMs — and I think this is specific to managing knowledge workers who are skilled at the same craft you are — is that your job is not to apply your judgment. It's to develop theirs.

What actually needed to change

A few specific things I've had to work on consciously:

Asking before offering. I've gotten disciplined about asking "what options are you weighing?" before I say anything that sounds like a recommendation. Not because I don't have a view, but because their reasoning process matters more than my answer in that moment.

Letting people be wrong in low-stakes situations. This one is uncomfortable. When I can see a decision heading somewhere suboptimal, and the stakes are low enough, I've learned to let it play out rather than course-correcting. The PM learns more from the outcome than from my intervention. And I've been wrong about "suboptimal" before.

Separating my preferences from the bar. I have opinions about how to write a PRD, how to structure a roadmap review, how to run a discovery interview. Those opinions were formed from my own experience and context. They're not universally correct. The bar is: does the output serve the product and the team? Not: does it look like what I would have produced?

What surprised me

I expected managing people to feel like less direct product work. It does, in one sense — I spend more time in conversations about how to navigate a stakeholder than I do in sessions designing a feature.

But the product instincts transferred more than I expected. Discovery is discovery whether you're investigating a customer problem or understanding why a PM on your team is struggling with prioritization. The same discipline of separating symptom from root cause, of not jumping to a solution before you've understood the problem — it applies in both directions.

What I wasn't expecting was how much more leverage this role creates. When a PM I've coached ships something excellent, the pride I feel is different from what I feel shipping something myself. It's less personal and somehow more meaningful. The work outlasts your direct involvement in it.

One thing I'd tell myself a year ago

Stop mistaking confidence for clarity. Being a good IC makes you confident in your judgment. Managing a team requires you to be clear about your expectations, but genuinely uncertain about your PMs' paths to meeting them. The confidence is less useful. The clarity matters more than ever.