At some point in your PMM career, someone will ask you if you want to manage people. Or maybe you’ve asked yourself. Maybe it’s your own manager planting a seed. Maybe it’s a new role opening up. Maybe it’s just the quiet assumption baked into most career ladders that “up” means “people.”
I want to squash that assumption. Not because leading a PMM team isn’t a worthwhile and rewarding path, it absolutely can be. But because it is a fundamentally different job, not a natural evolution of being a great PMM. And conflating the two does a disservice to good people on both sides of the equation.
Two Paths. Both Valid.
The PMM discipline has a genuine dual track, even if most companies don’t articulate it clearly.
The first path is the senior IC, the individual contributor who goes deep. The PMM who becomes the authority on a market, a product domain, or a craft. The person who drives the work that the whole company rallies behind, who runs the research that changes the roadmap, who walks into the most complex competitive deal and knows exactly what to say. This person is not failing to grow. They are growing. Just differently.
The second path is people leadership, the PMM who finds energy not just in the work, but in being accountable for other people’s success. In building the team, setting the structure, and then getting out of the way enough to let people find their own rhythm within it.
Both paths have a ceiling eventually. I won’t pretend otherwise. In most companies, at some level of seniority, management becomes the expected route for continued advancement. But that ceiling is further away than most people think. A great senior IC PMM can have a long, impactful, well-compensated career without ever managing a single direct report. If someone tells you otherwise, that’s a company problem, not a discipline problem. And they are wrong.
What People Management Actually Is
Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: people management is a vocation, not a promotion.
It requires something specific from you as a person. You have to find genuine energy … not obligation, not tolerance, actual joy in being accountable for someone else’s growth. In the 1:1s that go off-script. In the moment a team member figures something out that was frustrating them for weeks, and you feel that as a win even though you didn’t do the thing. In the hard conversation you have with someone who isn’t performing, where the goal is to help them, not just to manage the situation.
If that doesn’t sound like something you’d find fulfilling, that’s not a character flaw. It’s information. Not everyone is wired for it, and pretending otherwise produces bad managers and unhappy people.
You also have to want it. Not the title. The actual job. Because the actual job is a lot of things that have nothing to do with the craft you fell in love with. Headcount planning. Performance reviews. Budgets. Upward management. The meeting about the meeting. The politics between teams that you now have to navigate on behalf of people who are depending on you. You will do less of the work yourself and more of the work of making other people’s work possible. If that trade sounds like a loss to you, that’s worth knowing before you make it.
What Leading Actually Requires
If you do want it, here’s what I believe it actually takes.
- Define the structure, then let go. Your job as a PMM leader is to set the strategy, build the team blueprint … who owns what, how decisions get made, how success is measured … and then create enough space for the team to find their own rhythm within it. Micromanagement isn’t just inefficient, it communicates distrust. Your team can feel the difference between a leader who holds them accountable and a leader who can’t let go. One of those builds great PMMs. The other one demoralizes them.
- Stand up for the team. This one matters more than most people say out loud. When another team is randomizing your people, when a process is creating unnecessary overhead, when someone’s work is being attributed elsewhere … your job is to shield the team from that and go fix it. Quietly if possible, loudly if necessary. Trust is built by saying what you will do, and then doing what you said. That applies to your team as much as to anyone else.
- Adapt your style. I am a direct person. Open, transparent, and comfortable with candid feedback in both directions. That style works well with some people and lands terribly with others. Learning to read what someone needs from a conversation, not just what I want to say in it, is something I’ve had to actively work on. Your style will have its own sharp edges. Good managers find them and file them down, not to become someone they’re not, but to make sure their intent actually lands. Being able to “tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the journey” as my mother used to say.
- Delegate, and mean it. Delegation is not assigning tasks. It’s transferring ownership. If you’re reviewing everything before it goes out, you haven’t delegated, you’ve just added a step. The uncomfortable truth of people management is that sometimes your team will do things differently than you would, and the answer is to let them, unless it’s actually wrong. The worst managers I’ve had either changed things to their way, not making it better, just their type of different, or couldn’t get out of the way and let the work get done. The distinction between “I wouldn’t have done it that way” and “this is wrong” is one of the more important judgment calls you’ll develop as a manager.
The Journey
Most PMMs who end up in leadership don’t get there by asking for the title. They get there by doing the work that demonstrates the instinct. They forecast the desire, then they work on the attributes that show they are ready and have the correct approach to lead.
Virtual teams. Cross-functional projects where you have accountability but no authority. Mentoring an earlier in career PMM. Taking on the coordination role for a major launch, not because someone asked you to, but because you saw the gap and filled it. These are the rehearsals.
The ability to hold people accountable when you have no formal power over them is one of the clearest signals that someone is ready to lead. If you can get a Product manager, a Sales rep, and a Marketing counterpart all aligned and moving in the same direction through influence alone, you’ve demonstrated something a title can’t give you. Becoming a manager is not a magic button for control, in fact it’s often the opposite.
Seek out those moments before you seek the role. They’ll tell you whether you actually want it, and show others that you have what’s needed and you’re up for the challenge.
For the PMMs Who Don’t Want That Path
This is for you too.
Your value doesn’t diminish because you’re not building toward management. The experienced senior IC who knows a market cold, who can write positioning that actually wins, who has the instinct for what a buyer needs to hear and why … that person is rare and genuinely valuable. In many PMM teams, they are the most valuable person in the room.
If you’re in a company that treats management as the only valid definition of career growth, that’s a constraint and there is no point pretending it isn’t. But it’s a company problem, not a PMM problem, so be honest with yourself about whether the ceiling you’re bumping against is you, the discipline or the specific environment you’re in.
Great PMM work compounds. The instincts you build over a career, the market knowledge, the craft, the ability to read a room and write a message that moves people … that doesn’t plateau just because you chose not to manage anyone.
Go deep. Stay sharp. Do good work.
That’s a career too.
Adam