Build Like a Product Manager, Think Like a General Manager

How product managers can lead outcomes

It's happening to product managers everywhere—in-place "promotions" from a product manager to a general manager. An in-place "promotion" strikes in a leadership vacuum. Your direct manager has to handle something important, and you need to do your product management job at a higher level.

Today, leadership vacuums hit from:

• Flattening organizations: people managers expected to lead 20+ direct reports

• Gen AI elevates product managers to cross-functional leaders: people collaboration takes a fraction of the time

• Interwoven technical and business depth: broad system knowledge is required for growth

Product managers at all levels are expected to step up to lead cross-functional teams in complex environments with minimal management support.

This is a great opportunity to make your mark on your product and accomplish a lot.

How do you shift from being a product builder to a business owner?

The Hidden Blind Spots

With your expanded scope comes new challenges. A few typical issues that general managers face are:

• Over-focusing on business metrics

• Pushing decisions without alignment

• Earning trust

• Making strategic tradeoffs

• Working with team design

You might be thinking: this has nothing to do with product management! You are right.

Before your "promotion" in place your management chain and organization let you focus on your product.

Ok, so these blind spots might affect you. What do you do about them?

Take these steps to proactively uplevel yourself:

1. Recognize the signals of your blind spots

2. Change your mental model and tools

3. Stop trying to control your team

4. Grow into your new role

Your product management role has prepared you to handle strategy, operations, customers, and organizational issues. As you step into broader responsibilities, you can build on your product skills to recognize patterns, build relationships and communicate your point of view to continue growing.

Spotting the Signals Early

Often, your anger can guide you to your blind spots. When you catch yourself thinking

"This is so simple."

"What were they thinking?"

"I've said this before."

"This is terrible."

This is a sign that you could be hitting a blind spot. Besides anger and disbelief, here are some other early signals of general manager blind spots:

Signal 1: Overfocus on business metrics

Signs:

• Revenue targets without operational actions

• Avoiding investment due to margin impacts

• Pipeline expectations that ignore sales lead time

What's missing:

• Spending time with the finance team

• Your understanding of the product linkage to business metrics

Signal 2: Pushing decisions before alignment

Signs:

• Finance and sales don't understand your goals

• The product team is confused about deadlines

• You carry most of the product accountability

What's missing:

• Shared goals

• Knowing the reasons for high priorities

Signal 3: Underestimating trust in business ownership

Signs:

• Heroic, last-minute saves are celebrated

• Lots of exceptions to business as usual

• Limited peer-to-peer credit sharing

What's missing:

• The context of the product isn't widely known

• Relationship with finance, sales, and operations

• Problem prevention

Signal 4: Strategic tradeoffs

Signs:

• Uncertainty of stakeholder positions on key decisions

• Limited debate about the criteria and decision-making

What's missing:

• Regular, non-urgent contact with stakeholders

• Understanding who's impacted by decisions

Signal 5: Working in organizational constraints

Signs:

• Don't understand team structures

• Bottlenecks from team to team

• Unclear handoffs

What's missing:

• Discussion of product initiatives early

• Shared understanding of the weakest link

These are a few warning signs that your system could operate better.

Mental Models and Tools to Level Up

Now that you see signs that product teams and business teams are disconnected, you can start working on solutions. The key is taking your product skills with you into general management.

Looking at your product as a general manager, the practical tools are:

• Mental models - understanding incentives and motivations for all teams that contribute to the product

• Operational tools - Process and other methods to monitor the product's operational health. Examples are:

  • Business metric linkages

  • Customer health listening

  • Delivery cost management

  • Development readiness reviews

These tools help you see beyond features into product outcomes.

From Control to Coordination

One of the most important mindset shifts in stepping into a general manager role is moving from owning every decision to orchestrating system-level outcomes. Instead of focusing on what's in your immediate control, you begin to guide multiple teams toward a common destination—without directly managing them.

This shift starts with understanding:

• Team incentives: What motivates sales, finance, delivery, and operations?

• Organizational dynamics: Where are the handoffs rough, and why?

• Product accountability: Who needs to be in the loop, even if they aren't in your reporting line?

Then, reinforce your new perspective with operational tools:

• Metrics that link revenue, cost, and product usage

• Readiness reviews that expose risk before launch

• Customer health tracking that shows if your product is really working

These practices help you lead with influence, not authority—and keep you grounded in outcomes, not activities.

By integrating these tools and shifting your lens, you evolve from a product builder into a business leader who can scale outcomes across teams.

Free Resource: 4 ways to move from product manager to general manager. Spot the blind spots, use mental models and operational tools.

Conclusion: Grow into a General Manager

Stepping into GM responsibilities isn't a promotion—it’s a pressure test. It asks you to lead beyond your comfort zone, connect the dots between teams, and make judgment calls in unfamiliar territory. And while the blind spots are real, so is your foundation.

You already know how to think in systems, solve customer problems, and drive outcomes. Now, it’s about applying that same mindset to the business itself—its incentives, relationships, and tradeoffs.

You don’t need to control everything. You need to see clearly enough to lead through complexity.

The better you get at spotting the blind spots, the faster you grow from product manager to business leader.

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