Product Management and Waypoints
Introduction
The Waypoints framework aims to establish a comprehensive approach to engineering career development that emphasizes clarity, consistency, and a product-focused mindset. While engineering teams are typically sooner to require more structured career ladders due to their size, product management and design roles are equally critical to product success and deserve similar clarity in career progression.
Waypoints doesn’t provide a complete product management framework due to the diverse nature of these roles across companies. Instead, we offer recommendations to help you build your own product career ladder that aligns with our engineering framework. This appendix outlines these starting points while acknowledging that each organization will need to customize based on their specific product function.
The Product Management Challenge
Unlike engineering roles, which have relatively standardized skill sets and expectations across the industry, product management varies significantly between organizations:
- Some companies emphasize technical product managers with engineering backgrounds
- Others focus on business-oriented product managers with strong market analysis skills
- Product roles may overlap with product marketing, design, or business analysis
- The scope of responsibility ranges from feature-focused to full product line ownership
This diversity makes creating a universal product management framework challenging. However, the core principles of the Waypoints approach—clarity, consistency, and a product-centered mindset—can still guide effective product management career development.
Proposed Product Management Levels
We recommend adapting the general leveling approach from Marty Cagan’s books “Inspired” and “Empowered” to align with our framework.
Individual Contributor Track:
- P1: Associate Product Manager (APM) - Entry-level product managers learning the fundamentals under supervision
- P2: Product Manager - Product managers capable of independently owning features or smaller products
- P3: Product Manager - Product managers who own significant products with meaningful business impact
- P4: Senior Product Manager - Seasoned individual contributors who lead complex product areas and serve as mentors
Management Track:
- PM4: Group Product Manager - First management level, leading a team of product managers for a related set of products or features
- PM5: Director of Product - Product leaders who manage multiple product managers or groups and shape product strategy
- PM6: VP of Product - Executive-level product leaders who set company-wide product vision and strategy
Similar to our engineering framework, we recommend distinct tracks for individual contributors (IC) and management roles beyond P4, however, this will be dependent on the size and composition of your organization. If adopted, the management track allows product leaders to focus on building and leading product organizations, while the IC track enables product experts to advance without taking on people management responsibilities.
For the IC track, we recommend extending beyond P4 to include:
- P5: Staff Product Manager - Product experts who drive cross-functional initiatives with broad business impact
- P6: Principal Product Manager - Product visionaries who influence company-wide strategy and represent product excellence externally, often initiating and spearheading large scale innovation.
Product Management Capabilities
To assess and develop product management talent effectively, we have identified these key capabilities:
Product Discovery
The ability to identify customer/user needs, validate potential solutions, and define valuable product opportunities. This includes customer research, problem definition, and solution exploration techniques.
Strategic Thinking
The ability to develop a clear product vision and strategy that aligns with business goals and market opportunities. This includes roadmap development, prioritization frameworks, and competitive analysis.
Business Impact
The ability to connect product decisions to business outcomes and demonstrate value creation. This includes metrics definition, ROI analysis, and business model understanding.
Execution & Delivery
The ability to drive product development processes, ensure timely delivery, and maintain quality. This includes defining clear requirements, managing scope and timelines, and iterating based on feedback and results.
Technical Partnership
The ability to collaborate effectively with engineering teams, understand technical constraints, and make appropriate trade-offs. This includes sufficient technical knowledge to engage meaningfully in technical discussions and align product decisions with technical realities.
Decision-Making & Judgment
The ability to make sound, timely, and data-informed decisions in complex or ambiguous situations. This includes evaluating trade-offs, balancing short-term and long-term goals, and applying structured thinking when navigating uncertainty.
Leadership & Influence
The ability to guide teams, influence stakeholders, and contribute to a strong product culture. This includes communicating vision and priorities, creating alignment across functions, mentoring others, and fostering collaboration and innovation.
Conclusion
While the product management function varies more widely across organizations than engineering, establishing a clear career framework remains valuable for attracting, developing, and retaining product talent. The above approach laid out here aims to provide a flexible foundation that organizations can customize while maintaining alignment with core product engineering principles. As the Waypoints framework evolves, we anticipate developing more detailed guidance for product management roles based on community feedback and emerging best practices. For now, this structure offers a starting point for organizations seeking to bring the same clarity to product roles that Waypoints has brought to engineering careers.