The Catch 22 of how to become Head of Product is this: how can you demonstrate that you can do a job you’ve never done?
Stepping up from an individual contributor role to a Head of Product requires not only being excellent at your current job, but demonstrating that you have the capabilities to do a significantly different role.
There are techniques you can use to maximize your chances, and attributes which can help you get there.
In this article we’re going to walk you through
- Routes to getting the promotion: internal and external promotion avenues
- Attributes you need to demonstrate: results mentality, executive empathy, people management and operating systems mindset. Plus how to develop each of these
- Other advice to help you land the role: mentors, ambition, career development planning can all help support and plan your way to success
We’ll also be sharing some concrete examples along the way, to show you what’s good and what’s bad.
Let’s get into it now, starting with what the PM career typically looks like.
What the PM career looks like
Becoming a Head of Product is one of the biggest transitions in a product management career.
Broadly speaking we see product management careers as having four phases:
- Becoming a PM: the transition from a non-PM role or function to a full time product management role. This includes entry level PM roles all the way up to senior PM roles. This group works directly with engineers, and has no direct reports.
- Managing other PMs: transitioning from direct execution to management. This group includes Group Product Manager and Head of Product Management roles. It tends to be a big shift in ways of working. This is the transition covered in this article.
- Leading Product Management: representing the function as a whole and communicating to the leadership team. This group includes Directors VPs and SVPs. It’s a smaller jump but it’s more strategic, process driven and less operational than GPM or HoP.
- Becoming an Executive: stepping up to serving on a different team: the C-suite. This is a major jump up to company management responsibility, and may include more than one function reporting into you. This group includes titles like CPO, CPTO, Chief Digital Officer and so on.
Titles will vary across these groupings, but the transitions should be clear.
Becoming a Head of Product, and stepping up to managing other PMs is a major transition from an individual PM role. You’ve already managed one transition, so let’s get into how to manage the next one.
How to Become a Head of Product
There are two routes into the Head of Product role:
- Internal promotion: being awarded the role internally when growth or a vacancy allows
- Lateral move: seeking Head of Product roles elsewhere and demonstrating why they should take a chance on you
You don’t need to select between these: you can pursue both routes in parallel.
Internal promotion
There’s pros and cons to this option, vs seeking a role elsewhere. It might feel like the obvious option but it has some drawbacks.
Benefits
Let’s start with the obvious one: you already have a job with the company, and you don’t have to invest time or effort into getting employed there. In addition, you already know people, have built relationships and a reputation.
You also already have key context, like the company’s business model, competitor set, how it differentiates in the market and so on.
Negatives
In order to get this role internally, there needs to be a role available. If there is no role available at your company, you won’t get promoted.
Companies only promote based on need, not on merit. Internal promotions can be hard to achieve based on timings: when you’re ready, when they’re ready.
You also might not be the only candidate. Your peers, or externals may also compete for the role. It’s not uncommon for companies to insist on a process involving multiple candidates, including externals, in order to both be fair, and to be certain they are selecting the most qualified person.
It’s important to be realistic about the amount of opportunity within your company. You may well not land the role even if it does come round based on these factors.
Practical steps to take to increase your chances
The first thing to do is to be explicit with your manager that this is a goal you want to achieve. That will help you understand how close you are to being perceived as ready and what the possibility is of the role opening up. It also creates space to allow you to start demonstrating your readiness.
Managers won’t commit or guarantee you a promotion. But as a high performer, they will have a strong incentive to try and retain you: by providing opportunities to encourage you to stay.
You should never explicitly threaten a manager, but they will be aware that without advancement opportunities, top performers are likely to seek other roles and churn.
Gently hinting at this will alert them that you could be approaching that cliff, and encourage them to find routes for you. Or alternatively they might then support you in an external search.
When having this conversation, it’s important to think through your language and how you might come across to them. Avoid sounding too blunt, disinterested in your current role, or mercenary.
Example:
❌’Give me this role or I’m out of here’
✅’I really love this role and this company, and I’m interested in taking steps to advance myself. I wanted to discuss what it would take to step up to Head of Product’
❌ ‘I need to discuss promotion to Head of Product, since it’s the only way I’ll get paid more’
✅’I’m interested in progressing. I wanted to find out more about what a path to Head of Product might look like, and if it’s not available, to understand what a broader career path might look like with enough opportunity for growth’
Don’t be shy about having this conversation. You’re having it with someone who has asked the same questions.
Having the conversation transparently with your manager is key. Only by doing this can you gather some signals on your own capability and readiness, their propensity to promote or rate you, and whether the role might ever become available.
Be cognizant of the fact that they understand aspects of the role, or have beliefs about what is needed that may not align with your perception of how things stand between the two of you. Approach the conversation curiously in that light.
It’s very likely that you and your manager see the world differently. There will be asymmetry in views, based on needs, budgets and experience.
If you receive clear negative signals, you need to take stock of these and assess the situation realistically.
Example:
❌’Mmmm, well, that’s a way off’
❌’There’s some skills which I would like to see you master’
❌’Based on the company’s current growth rate, I don’t see a role opening up for some time’
There’s several ways to understand this feedback:
- Your manager is being honest with you: Option 1 is that it’s unlikely due to information they have, like upcoming redundancies, company growth rate, internal appetite for pay rises and promotions. Option 2 is that there’s a gap in perception and you have to improve performance to be considered.
- Your manager doesn’t believe in you: Regardless of your performance or the company growth, they don’t see you in this role. If your manager is not onside, this is a fundamental blocker to promotion. You need them to leave before you have a chance or you have to fundamentally change your relationship with them, which can be impossible.
In both these scenarios, you can invest time in improving.
You can work on your skills, actively demonstrate competence, by logging and demonstrating behaviors and results, and you can invest more time in building a high trust relationship with your manager.
This can only ultimately result in better performance, a chance at promotion or a better reference.
Nonetheless, you will face a tougher climb.
Your internal reputation tends to lag your current performance. If you didn’t have a great year last year, that’s the benchmark by which you will be seen. It might be that you’ve turned it around, but rebuilding trust takes time, and companies have long memories.
If there are fundamental differences between you and your manager that can never be resolved, or the company situation won’t change, you need to adapt accordingly. Sometimes people aren’t a fit for one company or one manager but do great elsewhere.
Example:
‘I’ve been offered a Head of Product role with a 10k salary raise, but I’d prefer to stay here.’
’Mmmm, well, I believe I can replace you for your current salary’
External promotion
If you’re blocked internally, you’ll start to look externally.
Benefits
There are far more available roles externally than there are likely to be internally. There may also be more candidates, but you can start to apply immediately and get feedback on the open market about your chances of landing a role. Forward motion usually feels good.
By applying externally, you can also tell your own narrative, and start fresh. A new set of people will evaluate you.
Negatives
Unfortunately you’ve never done this role before, and therefore you can’t demonstrate that you’ll be good at it.
Companies want safe pairs of hands, and to be able to score that safety versus an existing checklist. You may also face internal competition: folks that understand the product and the market, and who the hiring manager thinks are ready to be promoted.
Realistically a lateral move is a blank canvas. It can go well, or it can go nowhere.
Practical steps to take
You need to build an effective narrative around why you’re ready to make the step up to management. You’ll need to show you’re really good at what you do, and you’re stronger than the other candidates.
That means searching your experience to date for evidence of leadership behaviors and making them part of the story you and your resume tell.
If you’re not sure what the competencies are for management roles, a competency framework can help.
Check our Competency Framework Template and Guide.
Demonstrating competence is best done via a list of achievements and personal case studies that demonstrate that you have mastered leadership competencies already. You should build this and groom this whether you’re seeking an internal or external promotion.
When you apply for roles, you may well be up against competent, context aware internal candidates. On top of that, internal promotions have value to the hiring manager, in that they increase morale within squads and are more likely to be accepted by the team.
Having a warm intro, or referral, both helps warm up the hiring manager to the idea you can do the job, and builds your status alongside the internal candidate, by using social proof.
How to get a first round interview without applying
Gaining referrals is best done by building your network. Often people build their network only when they’re job hunting – but this should be an always on activity. Connecting with people at meet ups, conferences, talks, and make the effort to talk to the people who are more senior, and more likely to be hiring managers.
Example:
❌Simply asking if they have a job: leads to a yes / no answer; and being directed to the website if they do.
✅Try to build a relationship: compliment them on their talk, ask them questions about themselves, ask how they achieved their current position, and when they ask back, weave in that you are currently job hunting. Do not complain about your current or old job.
Running an active search is the last technique you can use to up your chances.
An active search is a highly focused job hunting and management strategy. You identify, track and prioritize jobs based on fit with your goals, allocating appropriate preparatory, application and effort accordingly. This involves running the search like a sales pipeline, scoring, tracking, and investing in opportunities.
Example:
✅Dream role comes up at Anthropic: spend 2 days prepping before you apply, including networking to try and land a warm intro.
✅Head of role comes up at a small start up – simply send in CV, allocate 2 hours max.
❌Firing the same CV into the same job portals repeatedly
What you need to demonstrate to become Head of Product
Let’s now get into the characteristics of what hiring managers look for.
We’ll go into these in more detail below.
Delivering results
This isn’t about possessing the PM toolkit, managing your roadmap well, or being hot on discovery. Ultimately this is about driving commercial outcomes and delivering an ROI on your team’s activities.
In order to show this you should be armed with case studies where you show that you have shipped products or features which delivered commercial uplift.
It’s important to be able to place monetary figures on your achievements. The more you increase in seniority, the more you need to demonstrate that you both understand and contribute to key company metrics. Ultimately these are always financial.
Example:
❌‘This drove a 10% increase in conversion’
✅‘By driving an increase in conversion at this stage of the funnel, we realised an extra 1m in revenue’
The only exception to this rule is customer count: it’s also acceptable to discuss winning more, churning less, and increasing customer spend as a result of activities.
Executive empathy
This competency is about being a team player – and the team is the company.
This means being able to demonstrate that you’ll take on and execute company priorities to a high standard, and that you’re a stress release valve for your boss, rather than a stress contributor.
People management skills
The people management toolkit is being able to hire, coach and fire PMs. You’re able to build good teams, get good results from teams and improve team quality.
It’s often less important to a hiring manager as a demonstrated skill than the first two points: capability and empathy. That’s because by demonstrating the first two competencies, your ability to step up to effective people management is increased.
Building an effective operating system
You understand systems thinking and can set up an effective cadence of meetings, KPI reviews and goals to help the team understand what is expected of them, and stay on top of whether they’re delivering their goals.
Delivering results
Here’s what it looks like:
- Frequent shipping: you’re shipping constantly, driving value and learnings
- Delivering results: the things you ship meaningfully change revenue or customer numbers
Case studies or examples should be clear, and you should be able to think of some quickly.
How to develop this attribute
If you don’t think you’re there yet, there are some steps you can take:
- Build relationships with commercial stakeholders: understand their needs, their blockers, and help them. This doesn’t need to be a feature list, but they will have clear needs that you can start to serve, and often they are closer to the customer than product teams.
- Don’t overthink the product process: not every feature or need needs a lengthy discovery and data analysis process. Shipping and seeing often drives results – simply through volume.
Pro tip:
Very often commercial stakeholders have issues with website tracking. A quick win can be identifying untracked high traffic pages on the logged out experience and implementing key tags. This might sound minor, but often it results in big marketing budget savings and an uplift in commercial results.
Executive empathy
Moving from IC (individual contributor) to a managerial position requires a significant mindset shift.
As an IC, your focus is on what’s best for you, and the team you directly work with. As a manager, your focus is broader: what’s best for the company and what helps the team of managers deliver as a whole.
This doesn’t mean you no longer question decisions or push the executive team. But it does mean you try to do it behind the scenes, and that when you disagree, you step up and really commit to driving that result. That means how you communicate to your teams: why the CEO has decided to do this, what the decision is and that it has to get done.
Not only this: but when you commit, rather than doing it somewhat, or doing it when you get round to it, if it’s a major decision, you pile in resources. That might be your own time, your top team members, or your personal brand to get things to happen. This is what it means to recognise the executive team as your own team, and to help them deliver their goals.
Pro tip:
If senior leadership (VPs, CPOs) know they can discuss unpopular or hard to sell goals with you, and that you will step up and help them problem solve on how to get the team to deliver it, this already positions you as management ready and helps relieve their stress.
If you act as an IC (shocked, push back, etc), they’ll treat you as part of the rest of the team – a communications problem to be managed.
How to develop this attribute
If you don’t think you’ve yet demonstrated this competency, here are some steps you can take to get there.
The first is to understand when and where to voice your concerns, and when to disagree and commit. You can think of this as two phases – there’s a time and a place for one, and there’s a time when that is over as an option. You can also identify when something is worth a discussion or not by asking simple but direct questions.
Pro tip:
When asked by a VP or CEO to build a feature that you have concerns about, ask up front ‘Is this up for discussion or is this something that’s decided?’.
That doesn’t make you difficult, it helps you understand whether it’s worth engaging or trying to transform, vs executing.
If they say it’s under review, then articulate your concerns crisply – but be prepared to come with another option. If it’s decided, your best bet is a response along the lines of ‘Not a problem, I’ll crack on.’
This mindset will go a long way to demonstrating that you’re on the same team as the company, and will demonstrate maturity and propensity to step up.
The next thing to do is to remember or understand that your leaders have priorities and stresses. You may not be aware of all of them, but they do, and you’re on their team to assist with both of those. Keep that top of mind. You don’t need to critique every single thing: it’s key to understand when and where to pick battles vs when not to sweat relatively small things that you might be wrong about.
Finally: lose the focus on yourself, and start developing a company first mindset. It’s important to start reframing topics in terms of the company need, vs why it’s important or bad for you. This isn’t just in your head, it’s how you speak about your goals.
Pro tip:
❌ ‘I should be promoted now to Head of Product’
✅ ‘The company is now big enough that it really needs a Head of Product role – teams are becoming misaligned and people need more support. By the way, I think could do that job but whether or not it’s me, someone should be doing it’
This isn’t only about reframing. Your rationale has to be genuine and credible, otherwise people will swiftly see through a self-serving veneer.
People management skills
Managers need to do tasks that ICs don’t: notably hiring and firing people. This is tougher, since you’re not formally empowered. But there are ways to demonstrate that you will succeed.
Again, often people who are ready to step up:
- Get involved in hiring: and give thoughtful, insightful feedback
- Help out junior colleagues: whether formally or informally, they’re seen as a leader within the team, and a helpful person to turn to
- Coaching: they might take on a buddy or onboarding role where they work with new or lateral hires to help them bed into engineering teams or the existing product processes
How to demonstrate this attribute
This might feel hard, but actually there are ways that you can start to show that you’re ready:
- Demonstrate a strong interest in management techniques: they ask their manager for coaching and reading materials while continuing to deliver core work
- Volunteer for hiring tasks: that could be a first round CV review, or helping in interviews as a peer review
- Make friends with HR: if you do get the chance to be involved in a hiring process, take time out to have a coffee with HR and understand their needs and what they look for. HR have a say in eventual promotion decisions.
- Write thoughtful feedback: this can be in 360 reviews, or when making hiring decisions
- Observe: if you can see that someone else in the team is struggling, offer to help them out, and (sensitively) let your manager know that you’d like to help
- Don’t skip the basics: managers really respond well to people who properly upwardly manage them. That means timely, structured updates, always updating your OKRs and running your 1:1s properly.
Check out our guide to Managing Up: Working well with your manager
Operating systems
Managers are responsible for the performance of multiple other people and don’t directly deliver the work themselves.
If you’re not in daily stand ups, or working directly with engineers, you need to build a mechanism to be on top of what’s happening in those teams, and whether they’re working well.
That means they need to make time to attend meetings (1:1s, delivery reviews, management meetings) and to create systems and processes that give them eyes on what’s really happening.
The people who are ready to step up to management often display strong systems thinking as an IC. Often this looks like:
- Creating best-in-class artefacts: they understand these as a critical communication tool for working with managers and peers
- Sharing templates and techniques: helping peers understand what’s working well for them, and how they can imitate and improve
- Making process improvements to managers: spotting gaps in information and systems within the team and proactively proposing ways to fix it
Example:
❌‘It’s a pain that we have to do more reporting’
✅‘I think if we did this, it would cut a meeting which would save everyone 1 hour a week, but also mean it was properly documented and everyone knew what was going on’
How to demonstrate this attribute
This is time consuming but it can have outsized impact. Managers love reports who are structured and document things, and they’ll start to see you as a leader.
To demonstrate that you’ll design strong management systems invest in:
- Turning your strongest artefacts into templates: make artefacts structured and repeatable, iterate and improve over time
- Never skipping artefact day: don’t skip making artefacts – you want to do this consistently and design a structured process which you always follow so that people know what to expect
- Sharing where appropriate: if you’re involved in onboarding, or your company has Confluence, or you see others struggling, share gently. Equally, someone else might have a killer template – if it’s better than yours, adopt
- Manage process: this isn’t a excuse to balloon or everything templates or process – if something doesn’t work, kill it. Your goal here is to design an efficient, effective machine
More advice
There’s some other advice you can follow that will increase your chances.
- Mentors: finding folks to help you make decisions
- Be ambitious: aim high for yourself and invest accordingly
- Plan it: how to plot out your goals, use a tracker, and not leave it to chance
Mentors
Find two to three mentors who believe in you. Mentors help beyond advice and coaching: they can help you assess potential opportunities as to whether they’ll advance your career. They should be able to help you through whether you should stay and wait for that internal promotion vs jump externally.
They may also be a source of warm intros to hiring managers, but this is much less common.
The ideal mentor is 1-2 steps further along in their career, rather than the most senior person you can source.
How to find a mentor
Be ambitious
There’s a correlation between how ambitious you are and where you rise to on the career ladder.
Being ambitious manifests itself not only in aspiration, but how much you invest in those aspirations. That might be proactively sourcing opportunities, following all this advice, investing in learning and development or knowing when to move.
Have a plan
Part of being ambitious is being able to articulate and plot out your ambitions. Invest time in making a career development plan, and deciding when you want to achieve certain goals. That will prevent you getting too comfortable or veering off track because you like your manager.
Check in with it routinely, every 3-6 months and make sure you stay on track with any actions you need to take. Discuss it with mentors. Adapt as necessary, but don’t let go of your aspirations.
A properly structured career development plan with actions you need to take will keep you on track. This is a big transition, so it’s worth investing in.
Building a career development plan
Wrap up on becoming a Head of Product
Becoming a Head of Product is a big transition from an IC role. Even when you think you’re ready, the transition might take 2-3 years: due to market conditions, what you’ll need to demonstrate, and because perception lags performance.
However, you have already managed to transition into product management, so by applying yourself, and developing your narrative and skillset, you’ll manage the next jump up the ladder.
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FAQs on How to Become Head of Product
As a Head of Product, how do you manage being close enough to execution, without getting sucked into IC work?
It’s not uncommon for Heads of Product to still have to cover or manage a team. It’s important to not let the IC role swamp your Head of Product role – as after all, you’ll be assessed as a Head of Product, not as an IC. In essence, solving this one comes down to ruthless prioritization and focus on solving the problem for the longer term.
In the first instance you need to time box and calendar manage, in order to ensure that you’re delivering the IC role as efficiently as possible. Dedicating time slots or days to each role can be useful.
Next, you must advocate for, and invest in hiring a replacement for your old role, or one that you’re covering. It’s important to be very clear with your own manager that your own performance will suffer until that role is filled, and to ensure you and they dedicate resources to it.
How can you deliver results in a company that is sales led or run on CEO instinct?
This is a two sided coin: on the one hand, in a sales led organization, it will be easy to link your work to revenue goals. In a waterfall-style organization, you’ll equally well be able to demonstrate frequent shipping and therefore some results.
Where you will be challenged in interview is on your role in achieving those results, rather than simply executing someone else’s strategy.
Here you need to be able to demonstrate how you took a need, or a pain point, which as described as a feature might have failed, and transformed it into something which delivered the results sales or your CEO wanted. As a bonus, being able to do this will demonstrate exec empathy.
