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The promotion trap
In the ratio era, success as a PM meant promotion to director, and then the instruction was to stop being hands-on and coach and guide. A players spent their time in alignment and in tweaking what their team was doing. Work went through review, got told no, and went back and forth in a yo-yo development process.
Whatnot runs the other way
Whatnot runs the other way. Four or five people manage other PMs, and all of them spend 90 plus percent of their time on individual contributor work, while the CPO spends about 50%. A leader with a decade or more of building behind them has honed instincts and decides quickly, instead of waiting on three layers of PMs and engineering teams debating.
The pay math
The pay math works as well: add up the comp of five L5s reporting to one L7 and four L7s reporting to one VP, then picture three people instead, each paid VP money. Directors and VPs stay in hands-on work, which keeps them connected to what is actually true rather than what seems true in a review.
Why are top performers promoted into management?
Companies often reward success in one role by moving the person into the next level up, even though the new job asks for different skills. In 1969 the educator Laurence Peter described this in The Peter Principle, arguing that people tend to rise to the level where they stop being effective. His book is the source of the name. Some technology companies later built parallel career tracks so senior individual contributors could advance without managing people.
How do experts decide so quickly?
The psychologist Gary Klein studied fire commanders in the 1980s and found they rarely compared options side by side. They recognized a situation as similar to ones they had seen and acted on the first workable course. He called this the recognition-primed decision model and described it in his 1998 book Sources of Power. The speed comes from a large store of past cases, which is built from years of direct experience.
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