Junior PM vs Mid-level PM vs Senior PM

A simple framework for PM levelling, expectation setting, and career development.

In my 12 years at Meta, I’ve spent a lot of time in performance mashups and calibrations discussing people’s performance and readiness for promotion.

And as a manager, PMs on my team have often asked “what is expected of me at my level?” and “what do I need to do to get to the next level?”.

These are important but tricky conversations.

Product management is a discipline that’s notoriously hard to define; what a PM does may differ greatly between teams, who they’re working with, the domain they’re working in, or the maturity of the problem. In my experience, this can make it hard for managers to give clear guidance, or to calibrate PM performance across teams and orgs.

To help with this, I’ve ended up developing a simple framework that does a pretty good job of explaining the big, common differences between what should be expected of junior PMs vs mid-level PMs vs senior PMs.

I’ve shared this verbally hundreds of times, and multiple people have told me they found it helpful to build their own mental models. I finally got round to writing it down and sharing it within Meta, but I think it may also be valuable outside — hence sharing here.

First, lets define the core job of the PM:

1. Problem: Understand user or business problems and rally people around the idea that they need to be solved.

2. Solution: Explore the potential solutions to the problem, and identify the most promising opportunities.

3. Execution: Bring those solutions to market to realise business impact.

Then, here’s broadly what PMs do at different levels.

• At the junior PM level, the problem is clear, the solution is clear, and the PMs job is mostly to drive execution. This is not to be sniffed at: driving execution is HARD. You’ve got to balance competing equities (time, cost, quality), keep people motivated and focused, anticipate and remove blockers, and keep stakeholders informed about progress.

• At mid-level PM, the problem is clear but the solution is not clear. Mid-level PMs should be able to take hard problems and develop strategies and novel solutions to solve them. They’re expected to drive consensus around these plans with their peers and org leadership. Then, they’re expect to drive execution and realise the impact.

• At the senior PM level, the problem isn’t clear, so neither is the solution. The key difference between mid-level and senior PMs is their proven ability to identify new problems that are not being solved, and build consensus a) they exist and b) they should be solved, and secure the resources needed to do so (e.g. by pivoting their team in some new direction, or acquiring additional resources). Then, they can do all the things other PMs can do: identify the most promising solutions, and drive execution.

• Super-senior PMs can do what senior PMs can do, but on multiple projects, in extremely ambiguous problem areas that typically cross org boundaries.

Here’s a diagram that captures this mental model:

This framework is pretty simple and high-level, but time and again it seems to be an “ah ha!” moment for people who’re struggling to build a mental model of what’s expected of them, and the kind of things they need to do to be considered to be operating at the next level.

Some notes:

• Non-canonical: There are other ways to become a senior IC PM — for example, at large organisations like Meta, just executing cross-company projects is a specialist skill, so much so that there’s a “Captain archetype” that IC7 (super-senior) PMs can aspire to.

• This is for ICs, not managers. PM managers’ expectations should include a whole other set of things: can they build and develop a great team? Do they show care? Can they manage underperformance?

• Incomplete: There’s more to each level than this - for example, this framework doesn’t include other ways PMs add value: interviewing & recruiting, mentoring, creating forums for information building and intra-discipline socialising.

• Meta-levels: At Meta, Junior was equivalent to IC4. Mid-level is equivalent to IC5, and Senior is equivalent to IC6. Super-senior means IC7. Different companies will have their own levelling mechanisms - hence using the more generic junior/mid/senior frame here.

Thanks to Nam, Jenny, Jess, and Maxime for reviewing early drafts of this post, and encouraging me to write it down and share it more broadly.