Not everyone builds products, but there is considerable overlap in knowledge and skill set between the best PMs and the top performers in sales, support, success, and other orgs. In an ideal world, everyone at a startup knows how to truly think about products. They know how to take a customer’s feature request and uncover the problem underneath instead of just passing on a proposed solution to the product team. They know how to think in first principles, they know what good design looks like, and they know how to measure success. Most importantly, they know how to take their observations, metrics, OKRs, or KPIs and use them to explain to the product team why the roadmap or strategy doesn’t match what they’re seeing and measuring. The product team should not be the de facto authority or single source of guidance at a company. If it is, that’s a strong indicator that the other teams need to level up.

I’ve mentored most organizations outside of the product team - most notably engineering, design, success, support, and sales - by leading team trainings, small group workshops, 1:1 sessions, and writing internal blogs. I have particularly deep experience helping overseas and international teams, as well as very junior teammates just starting their careers in tech.