Interesting discussion. Every tech company I know of has a career path for engineers who don't want to get into management (with roles like staff, senior staff, principal, distinguished engineer, technical fellow etc.) and so you can keep progressing basically indefinitely as an IC. I have never seen this done on the product side, however. After a point every product manager has to start to focus on people management to get ahead, which undoubtedly has a negative effect on the product itself. I wonder if more companies will start following this approach for non-technical roles as well.
It's also missing from the marketing side of the house. I've jumped between technical marketing (being an expert on the software we sell) and marketing technology (being an expert in the tools we use to power our marketing stack). In both types of roles, I've found it difficult to find career progression without a move into management. So I guess now I'm in middle management, and struggling with this for helping my own employees along their career paths.
There sadly doesn't seem to be much appetite for finding parity with the product engineering side of the house, even when the work is quite similar. A principal architect is a principal architect, whether the systems they are tying together are Istio and Redis and Kubernetes or Salesforce and Marketo and Tableau. A Senior Developer is a Senior Developer whether the code they're writing is for our product or for the backend of our CMS.
I have seen a "Principal" Product Manager role at some companies I have worked at, but the Distinguished Product Manager level role is not one that I have seen in practice unfortunately.
This is my experience as well. In most companies I've worked at (non-FAANG) the product team just isn't really large enough to support a more variable career chart. You have 8-10 PMs. You promote 1 to manager and another to principal. So does the one manager have 9 reports? You end up with a strange org chart where some director's at facilitating work, and others are doing more strategic stuff. Ultimately some manager is going to be over burdened with days full of 1:1's and that's it.
Interested in hearing other's experience with this!
