At a Glance
Many product people rely on their organisation to fund learning, guide development, and shape their career path. That’s a risky assumption. Product management careers are long and unpredictable, and no employer is responsible for managing your long-term growth. This blog argues that product professionals must take ownership of their own career development, setting goals, investing in learning, building networks, and closing capability gaps deliberately. Strong product people don’t wait for opportunities to appear; they create them.
I couldn’t leave my career in the hands of an employer. So I didn’t.
As a founder of a business dedicated to building the capability of product people, I often hear that they aren’t doing any learning during the year because their organisation has no budget.
WOWSERS!
I am concerned that product people are relying on the performance of an organisation to navigate and grow their individual careers. I would never leave that up to a third party or an organisation.
You may expect product leaders and the people and culture teams to look after your personal career trajectory, but it is simply outside their remit. To be fair, it was never their responsibility to manage your whole career, only to ensure you can excel in your current role and to map out the internal pathway available to you.
Your Career Belongs To You
Your career is greater than one company or one role. It is how you have chosen to spend your life. It will outlast any job you hold. You cannot expect your manager to consistently decide which learning you pursue, which books you read, which training programs you attend, or which roles you should be aiming for, and you certainly can’t expect them to fund all of it.
That means the driving has to come from you. Use your manager as a coach and an advisor, absolutely. But you are the one in the seat.
The Atlassian redundancies are a sobering reminder of what’s at stake. If you’ve been relying on your manager or your organisation to grow your career, you may find yourself without one. But if you’ve been building one, investing in yourself, staying sharp, building your network, you simply move your sights to a different organisation. The scaffolding is yours to take with you.
And yet, when I ask product people about their personal budget for learning and development, I’m met with blank stares. There is no personal budget. It only exists if their employer funds it. Think about that for a moment. You’ll budget for a gym membership, a holiday, a new car, things that matter to your life. But your career? The thing that funds everything else? That gets left off the list entirely.
Your career is not your employer’s asset. It is yours.
It deserves a line in your personal budget just like everything else you value. And I recognise that for some, that line is genuinely hard to find. But even a small, deliberate commitment, a book, a free meetup, an hour a week of focused reading, is ownership. It’s the mindset that matters as much as the money.
More importantly, managing your own career gives you something far more valuable than job security. It gives you a whole bunch of options. You can leave an organisation that no longer serves you, move countries, or shift careers entirely. That kind of freedom only comes when you’re the one in the driver’s seat.
So What Do You Actually Do?
Start with your personal career vision. This is arguably the hardest part. You’ll need to look outward. There are plenty of workforce trend reports worth reading, but ultimately, this comes down to getting honest with yourself about where you want to be. These days, especially for product people, AI is blurring responsibilities across design, engineering, and product. Figure out where you sit in that murkiness. If you don’t, your organisation or the market will figure it out for you.
Set your timeline. Are you thinking six months, two years, or five? The horizon shapes everything that follows.
Get clear on your why. Why does this goal matter to you? When things get hard, and I can assure you, they will, your why is what keeps you moving.
Build the career plan. What do you need to do to get there, and by when? This is where intention becomes action.
Start by identifying your strengths and skill gaps.
The free Brainmates Product Capability Assessment maps your skills across 24 core product skills and gives you a personalised report, so you know exactly where to invest first. It's a great way to start to build your plan.
Be Specific
Building the plan means getting specific. Start by identifying your capability gaps, the skills, knowledge, and experience that sit between where you are now and where you want to be. Then prioritise. You won’t close every gap at once, so decide where your time and money are best spent first. And keep asking yourself: will closing this gap actually get me where I want to go?
The plan itself can draw from a wide range of levers: networking events, meetups, and industry talks; training programs, university courses, books, and blogs; writing and speaking to build your profile; finding a mentor or investing in a coach; building products singlehandedly with AI tools; and cultivating relationships that will matter over the long arc of your career.
For me, two levers have defined my career more than any other: reading prolifically and getting myself in the room. I have invested deeply in both, not because an employer asked me to, but because I chose to. The books shaped how I think. The events, the conferences and the discipline of pushing myself to genuinely connect with people built something that no training budget could ever buy: a network I can actually call on. When I need advice, a referral, a perspective, or a door opened, I have people I can ring. That doesn’t happen by accident. You want that for yourself, too.
Start Today
I know this works because I’ve lived it. I couldn’t leave my career in the hands of an employer. So I didn’t. I built Brainmates from the ground up, moved into consulting, and became CEO. Nobody handed me that path. I created it deliberately, investment by investment, relationship by relationship. And if I can, you can too.
