Product strategy, PM career growth, and lessons from eight years at Asana

Executive overview

Most PMs conflate strategy with roadmaps or revenue targets, leaving critical dots unconnected between business goals and product decisions. Jackie Bavaro breaks strategy into three distinct components and shows how to develop each one collaboratively.

She also surfaces why early-career PMs misread the role, why management is lonelier than it looks, and how one conversation with your manager can accelerate every promotion.

A complete strategy requires vision, a strategic framework, and a roadmap — and missing any one of them is why strategies fail to align teams.

The three components of product strategy

• Vision — an inspiring picture of the future that makes people want to build it with you
• Strategic framework — defines the market, what winning looks like, and the big bets required; produces your pillars
• Roadmap — works backwards from the vision to expose whether your current pace can hit it in the target timeframe
• Roadmaps are not commitments; they reveal feasibility gaps and trigger resourcing or prioritisation decisions
• Most strategies are missing the framework: a revenue target alone is not a strategy

Connecting the dots

• Strategy is the chain of reasoning from high-level business goal down to specific product bets
• The only way to find missing links is to communicate your strategy repeatedly and listen for confusion
• People hide confusion — pay close attention to where assumptions differ between you and stakeholders
• Disagreements that recur across features signal a missing strategic principle, not a feature preference
• Work backwards: given 20 things the team could build, match them to the stated goal and explain why each one does or doesn't advance it

Getting better at strategy

• Strategy is collaborative; go into conversations with a draft so you can contribute, not just listen
• Cross-apply frameworks from other domains — a framing that works for search may unlock a video problem
• Longitudinal experience matters: staying long enough to see results and try alternatives builds pattern recognition
• For the first six months on a product, don't try to set strategy — learn the existing one and deliver on it
• After six months, block half a day, pick whichever of the three pillars draws you most, and start writing

PM career: early stage

• Work at a larger or mid-sized company early — learn best practices, build a network, and establish compensation baseline
• When assigned a narrowly scoped problem, do the simple thing well; earning trust comes before being outstanding
• Common mistake: dismissing day-to-day PM work while angling for management — it signals immaturity and makes you harder to promote
• Avoid both under-contributing (letting a strong designer lead everything) and over-contributing (crowding out engineers)
• Peer reviews are a major part of most review cycles; burning bridges costs more than any individual win

Navigating promotion and management

• Have one conversation with your manager: "I'd like to become [X] — what should I work on now to be ready?"
• This frames the goal as future-oriented, avoids putting your manager on the defensive, and aligns their feedback to your actual gap
• At committee-based companies, also build relationships with your manager's peers — find someone who has promoted someone before
• Management is lonelier than IC work; your team treats you differently when you hold the authority
• Senior IC compensation at top companies matches what doctors and lawyers make — management is not the only path to financial growth
• IC career tracks rarely produce many promotions above senior PM; growth can come from switching products, companies, or domains instead

On coaching

• Coaching works best when you have a specific thing to work on, not as a standing indefinite engagement
• A coach who is outside your evaluation chain allows complete honesty
• Beware of making small problems feel bigger once a coach is involved — check whether you actually need external support

Lessons from Asana

• Shutting down ideas quickly — even bad ones — damages collaboration; the problem someone raises is usually real even if their solution isn't
• Getting into higher-level planning meetings: prep the questions your manager needs answered, then offer to attend and save them time
• Eight years at one company provided compounding growth: each strategy cycle built on the last, producing pattern recognition that can't be shortcut
• Burnout at the leadership level often comes from holding confidential information that conflicts with what your team needs to hear