Bending the universe to your advantage: building influence and agency in tech

Executive overview

Career growth isn't about waiting for promotions—it's about identifying what your organization needs, proposing solutions that benefit the business, and demonstrating the skills required for your next role. Your agency matters more than your current position. Know what you want, make the case to your manager with specificity, and focus on producing results that speak for themselves. The universe is bendable to people who take action.

Accelerating your career as a PM

Know exactly what your next role is. Be explicit about it to your boss and ask them to partner with you on the plan. Let the work speak for itself—high performers get promoted as fast as the organization can support them. Focus on how a role solves a problem for the company, not on personal career advancement. Understand your organization's talent calendar and promotion cycles so you have conversations at the right moment.

Moving outside your function to grow

Don't stay confined to product. Look left and right—take on marketing, operations, engineering challenges if they're important to the business and play to your strengths. Generalist roles early in your career build the foundation for broader leadership. If you can operate across functions, you unlock more growth opportunities faster.

Finding your zone of genius

Audit your calendar: categorize work you hated, tolerated, and loved. Focus ruthlessly on what you'd do all day if you could. Find what no one else in the organization can do as well as you. For many PMs, that's traversing across functions—being fluent in product, engineering, design, data, and operations while seeing them as one system. Operating horizontally across functions and vertically between strategy and execution is energizing work.

Setting pace inside larger organizations

The clock speed of an organization locks to its calendar. Don't let recurring meetings drive your decision velocity. Set an explicit expectation: bring everything "one click faster." If something needs to be done this year, do it this half. This half, this quarter. Quarter, this month. Month, this week. Week, today. End of day. Make this a principle for your leadership team.

Never be the bottleneck. Maintain a high personal SLA so your team can move as fast as possible. Avoid letting artificial meeting cadences create false deadlines. Make decisions based on how much information you actually need, not Google Calendar.

Building a high-bar organization

Define your talent bar with specificity. Use leadership principles that are measurable, not soft. Instead of "manages multiple departments," define exactly what you expect to see demonstrated. Make a career ladder at senior levels that's tractable and specific enough that you can measure whether someone meets it.

Normalize feedback immediately. Clear is kind. Avoid conflict-avoidant cultures that degrade the talent bar. When people aren't meeting expectations, state it clearly and move quickly. This isn't cruelty—it's the kindest thing you can do. Most talented people will fix it. If they don't, moving them out fast is part of the job and ultimately better for them.

Being a woman in tech leadership

The numbers are real: 13% of founders are women, female-founded teams receive 2% of venture capital, women hold 30% of senior leadership roles, women are 30% of software engineers. Despite success, the path hasn't been easy at any stage. You will still encounter bias, questions about being "technical enough," and structural disadvantages.

Stay curious rather than angry. Understanding what's structural versus cultural versus internal to yourself gives you control. Being curious means you're not a victim—you're in charge. Validate your own competence without needing outside validation. Empower yourself by knowing your value.

Normalize seeing it. Leaders who look different, who have different backgrounds, who are women in technical roles—visibility matters. If you don't see it, you can't believe it's possible. More representation changes what the industry imagines.

The rise of the CPTO role

Product and engineering are one system. Combine them under a single leader responsible for R&D investment against business outcomes. This role requires technical depth—you need to understand architecture, platform decisions, and how software is built. You also need operational and organizational design skills since engineering teams are larger and face different talent challenges.

This works when you have a leader who's experienced across both domains, is on-call for infrastructure emergencies, and can move between strategy and implementation details. It's not a pure product role. You have to know what you're getting into and be technical enough to make the decisions.

The CPTO requires specific skills

You must be technical. Spend time on architecture, platform, velocity, and talent. The operational scope is significantly larger than product management. You're thinking about recruiting volume, culture challenges, org design. You live in pager duty—infrastructure outages wake you at one in the morning.

There's no perfect org structure. Design around your talent. If your CEO has the bandwidth and skills, they can do it. If not, bring someone in. The job is to optimize for the whole, not for individual functions.

Lessons from building ChatPRD

ChatPRD started as a ChatGPT prompt written during meetings to spec out complex technical products when you didn't have a technical PM available. It evolved into a custom GPT, then a standalone app using OpenAI's Assistants API. The standalone version learns from users' roles and company contexts to customize recommendations.

60% of users generate PRDs from ideas. 30% improve existing specs or strategies. The rest use it for brainstorming and internal PM work. It's not about replacing PMs—it's about letting them spend less time on scaffolding and more time on strategy and execution.

Prompt matters. Good instructions and context shape output quality. Competition matters too. Study what tools are already out there and build better. Monetization is complex in the current landscape, so focus on what's fun and sustainable rather than chasing scale.

AI will shift PM skills, not eliminate them

Short term: communication will change. Long term: believe in technology's positive impact. Lowercase c communication—sharing information, coordinating across functions—will be largely handled by AI tools. But capital C communication—being influential, convincing, bold, getting humans to follow you—is much harder to replicate.

Strategy work will accelerate, not disappear. AI is good at synthesis and plan-making, but the boldness, vision, and charisma required to move humans are still human skills. The identity shift for PMs will be: stop thinking your value is your individual ideas. Think: are we building the right stuff, building it quickly, and delivering value, regardless of tools?

Skills that matter most going forward

Writing PRDs, setting goals, writing specs, and roadmapping will be AI-assisted or automated. The jobs that remain are: developing strategy, getting buy-in from leadership, finding blockers, unblocking people, giving feedback, getting budget and resources, developing vision. The question isn't which jobs disappear—it's which ones do you want AI to do versus which ones are more powerful when informed by human judgment.

Specialize in AI-native products. Learn how to build products with LLMs and non-deterministic technologies. When mobile happened, PMs who specialized had their pick of jobs. Same moment now.

Contrarian view: sales-led is underrated

Sales-led businesses aren't the enemy of great products. There are tremendous businesses built on sales motions. You can care about craft, user experience, and commercial success simultaneously. Companies like SAP are powerhouses—product teams turn their nose up because they want "product-led," but there's nothing wrong with building something people need to buy rather than want to adopt.

Personally, I'd love to be on a quota selling enterprise software. Great product and great business aren't opposites.

Advice for career growth

Have fun. Acknowledge the privilege of a job where you type into an internet box to create products. You're sitting in a seat a lot of people want. Enjoy it. Help each other. It's a tough time in tech. Consistency wins—whether it's TikTok content or career growth, show up regularly and compound.

Document, don't create. Instead of treating content or work as art, document what you're thinking about, what made meetings interesting, what could be better. That becomes the natural basis for growth.

Always be curious. Curiosity and empowerment have been the path to joy in a sometimes complicated industry.