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.
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. 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. 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.
What People Management Actually Is
People management is a vocation, not a promotion.
You have to find genuine energy — not obligation, not tolerance, actual joy — in being accountable for someone else’s growth. You also have to want 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. 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
- Define the structure, then let go. Your job is to set the strategy, build the team blueprint, and then create enough space for the team to find their own rhythm within it. Micromanagement communicates distrust. Your team can feel the difference between a leader who holds them accountable and a leader who can’t let go.
- Stand up for the team. 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.
- Adapt your style. 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.
- Delegate, and mean it. Delegation is not assigning tasks. It’s transferring ownership. 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 demonstrating the instinct first — virtual teams, cross-functional projects, mentoring earlier-in-career PMMs, stepping into coordination roles because they saw the gap and filled it.
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. Seek out those moments before you seek the role.
For the PMMs Who Don’t Want That Path
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 — that person is rare and genuinely valuable. In many PMM teams, they are the most valuable person in the room.
Great PMM work compounds. The instincts you build, 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.
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