Tips For Designing Growth Pathways For Product Careers

In our previous article we explored the death of the product career ladder, its impact on the role progression expectations in product teams and suggested a change in the narrative of careers to focus on growth over title progression – something we term ‘growth pathways’. Now we will explore key focus areas for product leaders who wish to make the jump from the outdated career ladder to a growth pathway for their product teams.

Now I want to be clear – but no means is this an easy jump! Depending on your organisation, the concept of a career ladder where the growth of status, responsibilities & compensation proceeds linearly with minimal active engagement from the individual (other than performance in current role and time in seat), may be more or less ingrained.

In some cases where this is more ingrained, a growth pathway will be challenging as it places more emphasis on active engagement in careers and non-linear pathways. It may even cause some individuals to ‘opt-out’ and look for opportunities outside your organisation where they can pursue a linear career path. But the upsides for those who are open to pursuing this model of career development is that it builds for more resilient and engaged product team members with greater long term job security and more exciting product careers.

But first, what is a growth pathway?

Growth Pathways vs Career Ladders

Growth pathways acknowledge that there are many ways to progress a career other than title progression up a “ladder”. They acknowledge that skills & experience growth, particularly in transferable skills & experience, are the best way to grow careers, and thus place these at the center of careers rather than titles. A growth pathway also acknowledges a much wider set of movements that can be made to grow skills and experience than by the classic movement “up the ladder”. They also allow for these to be personalised to each individual in order for them to achieve new insight on their future career. Some of these movements are shown below:

It is important to acknowledge that even for product team members that want to grow their skills & experience in these ways, it is not made easy in many organisations. Some of the key structures that are barriers to an experience & skills-led growth pathway include:

1. Over-focus on specialist technical skills development to aid performance over identification & development of transferable skills
2. A lack of development and accountability for personal self-awareness & a lack of leadership role modeling of self-awareness
3. Over-focus on recognising performance in the absence of recognising the growth and discretionary effort that it takes to achieve high performance
4. Talent hoarding by managers and a lack of visibility into growth opportunities outside of their immediate manager remit
5. Focus on progression into people management roles

All of these in one way or another re-enforce the career ladder and may even disincentivise exploration and growth outside of a strict career ladder. This sets the expectations that if people ‘play by the rules’ of the career ladder, that their title should progress. But, for various reasons (explored here) this is an unrealistic model in most organisations. Continuing to re-enforce this narrative means team members will become dissatisfied with their career opportunities and eventually become disengaged.

In order to shift the narrative to focus on growth, it is important product leaders (potentially with the assistance of their people team) address some of these issues to ensure growth becomes the goal of career development with or without “climbing a ladder”. Below we give some tips on how to make positive progress in these areas to shift the career conversation.

Identification & Development Of Transferable Skills

Transferrable skills are those which are widely applicable across professions and organisations. Typically these can be adaptive skillsets like communication, stakeholder relationship management & collaboration, but can also emphasise the transferable elements of technical skills. For instance, skill in customer research requires critical thinking, planning and preparation and other skillsets that are useful in circumstances outside of the product profession. Most people have a hard time identifying transferable skills and there is often a larger focus on development of profession-specific skills like agile product development skills.

To create more flexible growth pathways, product leaders can explore:

1. Cross-team skills frameworks: These may sit within the realm of product e.g., product, data, design & engineering, or better yet, may cross into other business professions like marketing, finance and operations. This structure allows for better identification of skills relevant across many professions and the potential for pooling of learning & development across teams.
2. Cross-team project staffing & complimentary teams: Ideally transferable skills & experiences are developed on the job, but it can be hard to access opportunities when teams are fixed and largely focused on product development (e.g., classic product development squads). By forming teams flexibly around projects and problems to be solved that include different complimentary skills, team members get real world experiences of these skills. This can also be done with more formal secondments.
3. Exercises to explore transferability of skills: Including ‘skills retros’ or similar exercises as regular parts of development can help team members to identify new on-the-job skills learnt and how these can be applied.

Greater Focus On Self Awareness

Self-awareness is the capability to understand all aspects of oneself as an individual including thoughts, behaviours and emotions and why they exist based on personal history, culture, values and beliefs. Rarely is this skill focused on for development, but it underlies many growth outcomes for the individual. Individuals who are highly self-aware are more likely to be successful in any career path.

To explore the development of self-awareness for effective growth, product leaders can explore:

1. Self-awareness role modelling: One of the biggest inhibitors to self-awareness development is a lack of comfort and acceptance with vulnerability. This frequently comes from the example and culture set by leadership. Leaders who appropriately role model vulnerability & their own self-awareness can set a precedent for the importance of teams developing this skill.
2. Building reflection into development cycles: Performance cycles frequently emphasise salesmanship over true self-reflection. By separating development from performance cycles, it is possible to create more space for self-reflection & vulnerability – explored more in our article here.

Recognition Of Growth & Discretionary Effort

All product leaders want a ‘high-performing team’ and are often good at recognising performance either formally (promotion, compensation etc) or informally (kudos, awards etc), but may struggle to recognise what leads up to high performance. Performance is usually preceded by a long lead-up of skills growth and discretionary effort (effort beyond what is expected of a team member in their role). This lead-up often goes un-noticed until an outcome is achieved. In the case of some endeavors, this growth & effort may never be recognised at all – for instance when a big risk was taken but didn’t pay off or when something goes wrong.

It is important that product leaders find the time and space to recognise not only performance, but also the growth and discretionary effort of their teams. These are less likely to be formally recognised, so finding ways to informally recognise these – e.g., public kudos, a team lunch or a gift – can go a long way to making sure teams see the value of what leads up to performance.

Talent Hoarding & Visibility Of Growth Opportunities

Talent hoarding happens when managers ‘hoard’ high performing employees, limiting their opportunities for growth. It can be intentional or unintentional. For instance, one of the most common reasons employees may not be put forward for growth opportunities is that their managers are unaware of them. Growth pathways require that talent is free to grow and pursue experience, and talent hoarding is the antithesis of this.

To ensure the right opportunities are available to all, product leaders can explore:

1. Growth mentors / advisors: Ensuring that individuals have access to people outside of their direct managers that are aware of their growth & development needs can help to reduce talent hoarding. These should be of equal or higher standing to their managers to ensure any intentional talent hoarding can be addressed.
2. Manager KPIs incentivising growth: Looking at how people managers are incentivised can also be enlightening. Directly incentivising team member movement and growth and/or disincentivising talent hoarding with KPIs ensures that managers do not have conflicting priorities. It is important that these apply especially to high performers so it does not just incentivise the movement of problem individuals.
3. Open sharing of cross-team opportunities: Publishing or publicly sharing growth opportunities, secondments or internal roles can help individuals self-select growth opportunities and make managers more aware of what is available.

Identification Of Pathways Outside Of Management

Many organisations’ career ladders do not have opportunities for progression outside of people management. Some product organisations might offer senior subject-matter product roles (e.g., principal product manager) but they are not common and are often still shorter ladders than the comparable people manager pathway.

While it is often not possible for product leaders to offer these titles in a traditional career ladder, a growth pathway opens up the conversation for pathways outside of people management by default. By exploring a wider range of movement types (like the figure above) that develop skills and experience outside of people management, it is possible to better engage team members who may not be interested or amenable to management.

All growth pathways should address support and options for gaining skills and experiences to make career transitions. This may be formally through elements like secondment or re-skilling programs or informally through cross-team project experiences. Ensuring team members have access to high-profile projects that build their status and visibility as a subject matter expert and allow them to access higher level (e.g., executive) discussions are some ways that progression can be achieved outside of people management progression.

Final Thoughts

Growth pathways will not be right for all individuals or organisations, but the benefits that can be achieved for individuals, leaders and organisations can be great. Taking positive steps in the areas above can help to change the narrative on what career progression means to a more relevant context for the current state of product careers. Team members will be encouraged to explore their career opportunities from the basis of skills & experiences rather than linear title progression. The awareness this builds for them will be invaluable in their long-term career plan and will build for more resilient and self-aware product professionals and more interesting and diverse product careers.