The transition from Sr. PM to a Staff level: Execution to Strategic Work

What gets you promoted is not what you need to perform at your new level.

If your team can’t start a meeting without you, it might NOT be a good sign.

Set yourself up to do strategic work:

• Make spaces: Think about building a framework and processes so that your team does not depend on you to function.
• Be prepared: Being involved in everything will prevent you to be an effective PM

Strategy work — Decide what we work on and why.

• The execution work is the ‘How’.
• Strategy work can be concrete and tactical.
• The most important is the skill to know when to push (tactical) and when to take a step back (strategic).

Signs of balance between strategic and tactical work within a team:

• Engineers catch up on where we are going next and why. Leaders question why we are doing this. Strategic work is the multiplier, but you deal with the situation one-off. You spend too much time on tactics and let it run your way. If you take a step back and focus on the strategy, the tactical work would stop. Strategic work can be the most efficient tactical work.
• You firefighting all the time. The best thing to understand why the fire starts in the first place.
• If you do the strategic work right, you should have thoughts about new requests in advance.
• If PMs only make a deck and nothing got shipped, it’s right.

For teams who haven’t had a PM:

• Teams used to operate by themselves, so it’s unlikely for them to suck you into day-to-day work
• However, they might not be used to think about product as an iterative process. So, PMs should set up an experiment framework and learn.

Tips on tactical things:

• Block the calendars
• Don’t think about strategy as an afterthought. Good at saying ‘No’ — is it the best way to use my time now?
• Think about things that you don’t need to be involved
• How to help the other people start to do some of the work you need (be a multiplier)