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Why The Product Manager To CEO Pipeline Is The Underrated Crash Course For Leadership In Tech
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The road to the top rarely runs in a straight line, but there are less circuitous routes to becoming CEO.
Key facts
- But a separate 10-year study called the CEO Genome Project suggests that the fastest climbers ± “sprinters” who reached the CEO seat well ahead of the 24-year average, didn’t get there by climbing
- Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004, leading product management for the Google Toolbar, years before he became CEO
- Ben Chisell is the CEO of Paysend, a London-based technology company building a global payments infrastructure to facilitate money transfers
- Part of the reason the reporter thinks the PM-to-CEO pathway is so often overlooked is that the function is judged by its worst practitioners
Summary
But a separate 10-year study called the CEO Genome Project suggests that the fastest climbers ± “sprinters” who reached the CEO seat well ahead of the 24-year average, didn’t get there by climbing the corporate ladder to the top. In fact, what set them apart wasn’t pedigree but building a specific skillset that made them CEO material: decisiveness, reliability, adaptability, and the ability to engage people around a plan. Product management doesn’t appear in the CEO-pathway research, likely because none of the major studies breaks the role out as a separate category. But once you look at what the job demands, ownership of a tangible outcome, obsession with what customers value, the willingness to make tough decisions, it maps directly onto the traits the CEO Genome Project found in its sprinters.