Leading Product Teams at Scale: What Changes as You Grow

From Doing to Enabling

As an IC PM, your job is to ship. You're in the details—writing requirements, sitting in design reviews, tracking bugs, coordinating launches. Your output is directly visible.

As a Group PM or Director, your job shifts to enabling others to ship well. Your impact becomes indirect. You're successful when your team members are successful. This requires letting go in ways that feel uncomfortable at first.

Your Time Horizon

You can't be in every meeting or know every decision. You need to trust your PMs while staying informed enough to help when needed. This means building systems for staying connected—regular 1:1s, async updates, clear escalation paths—without micromanaging.

Instead of solving problems directly, you help others solve problems better. That means asking good questions, sharing relevant experience, connecting dots across teams, and removing obstacles. Sometimes your most valuable contribution is a fifteen-minute conversation that prevents weeks of wasted work.

IC work often operates in sprints and quarters. Leadership work operates in quarters and years. You're thinking about where the product portfolio needs to be in two years, how to develop your team's capabilities, what organizational changes might be needed. Short-term execution still matters—but it's not your primary focus anymore.

The Hard Parts

Letting go of craft. When you see a PRD that isn't as good as you'd write, your instinct is to fix it. The right move is usually to coach, not to rewrite. This is hard.

Giving credit away. Success belongs to the team. Failure is yours to own. This asymmetry is the job.

Patience with pace. Change happens slower when you're working through others. You're planting seeds and tending them, not forcing growth.

The Reward

When you build a team that operates well—that makes good decisions without you, that develops talent, that ships products that matter—that's a different kind of satisfaction than shipping something yourself. It scales in ways individual contribution can't.

The Takeaway

Leadership isn't just senior IC work plus management overhead. It's a fundamentally different role that requires different skills, different measures of success, and a different relationship to work itself.

The transition is hard. But for those who make it, the impact you can have expands dramatically.