Becoming a Product Manager, One Escalation at a Time

How operations roles can prepare you for a strong career in product management

Photo by Kalen Emsley

Introduction

The path into product management isn’t always linear, and despite how much we try to diagram it into a career ladder, the truth is that most people stumble into it. Some follow the traditional routes: MBA internships, engineering degrees, APM programs with crisp frameworks and neatly scoped features. Those paths work. But they’re not the only ones.

For those of us who’ve come up through business operations or chief of staff roles, the transition into product management might feel more like being dropped into a sprint retrospective with no context and being asked to “just facilitate.” But here’s the good news: if you’ve served as the connective tissue in a high-functioning (or barely functioning) organization — if you’ve wrangled stakeholders, fixed gaps no one else saw, and executed on problems before they had names — then you’ve already been doing product work. You just weren’t calling it that yet.

Here are four lessons learned from that experience, and why they map surprisingly well to life as a PM.

1. Get Comfortable with Ambiguity

If you’ve ever worked closely with executives, you know that clarity isn’t always part of the package. Leaders are overloaded. They often know something is broken, but they don’t have the time, data, or proximity to tell you exactly what needs fixing. That’s where you come in.

In operations or chief of staff roles, your job is to make sense of messes. You sift through noise, identify root problems, and shape a path forward, often without explicit instruction. This ability to work through ambiguity is not a bonus in product management. It’s the job.

The best product managers don’t wait for perfectly scoped problems. They take nuance as input and synthesize a direction. They make confident decisions based on partial information, knowing the risk of inaction often outweighs the risk of being wrong. If you’re coming from a background where you were constantly connecting dots across incomplete data, you’re already fluent in a core product skill: navigating complexity with composure.

2. Influence Without Authority

One of the first things you learn in ops or as a chief of staff is that no one works for you…not officially. You might have access. You might have visibility. But you don’t have direct control. What you do have is the opportunity to influence outcomes by earning trust.

This means learning how to move a room without being in it. Knowing which question will unblock momentum, and which one will trigger defensiveness. You develop a kind of organizational fluency — built on listening more than speaking, doing your homework, and making other people feel like your idea was theirs all along.

By the time you land in product, you realize that this skill is not extra credit. It’s the engine. Product managers rarely have formal authority, but we’re still expected to guide priorities, align teams, and drive outcomes. Influence isn’t soft power. It’s applied empathy, credibility, and consistency. And if you’ve come from a role where making progress required you to align people who reported everywhere but to you, congratulations, you’ve already been doing it.

3. Develop Your Executive Presence

"Executive presence" might sound like something you’d find in a gift bag at a corporate retreat, somewhere between a branded notebook and a book no one finishes. But if you’ve ever watched someone with a louder voice and a worse idea win the room, you know it’s real and you know it matters.

In operations and chief of staff roles, you learn quickly that presence isn’t about volume. It’s about timing. It’s about knowing what matters to leadership before they say it. It’s about saying less, but saying it with clarity, with calm, and at exactly the moment the room needs a center of gravity.

Product management tests this constantly. Roadmaps shift. Confidence wavers. Competing priorities fight for airtime. When the room feels chaotic, people look for the person who doesn’t flinch. Your ability to communicate with precision, hold tension without panic, and keep the team moving is often what separates a good PM from a great one. If you’ve already spent time near the decision-makers — supporting them, advising them, and occasionally holding the whole thing together — you’ve been practicing executive presence all along. You just didn’t put it in a bullet point.

4. Don’t Be Scared to Execute

Strategy is nice. So are workshops, whiteboards, and the occasional well-placed Post-it. But at some point, someone has to actually do the thing. And often, that person is you.

Operations teaches you this early. While others are still reworking the slide deck, you’re booking the meeting, drafting the plan, setting the tempo. You learn that execution is where the real complexity lives. People are unpredictable. Systems don’t behave. Timelines slip. But none of that matters if you know how to move anyway.

In product, momentum is everything. You’ll rarely have all the answers, but action reveals insight. The most trusted PMs are the ones who don’t wait to be told what to do; they try something, learn quickly, and keep going. If you’ve spent your career turning vague instructions into real results, you already know how to ship. You just need to remember that execution isn’t a lesser skill than vision. It’s the one that makes vision real.

Conclusion: Product Is a Familiar Job in New Clothing

At its core, product management isn’t so different from the work you’ve already been doing. You’re still in the middle of the chaos, balancing competing truths, aligning people with different incentives, and making sure things keep moving in the right direction.

The title might change. The tools might get fancier. But the fundamentals remain the same.

Business operations and chief of staff roles build an instinct for clarity in ambiguity, action in uncertainty, and influence without authority. You know how to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, between leadership vision and operational reality. That’s product.

It’s not about owning the roadmap. It’s about earning the trust to shape it. Not about being the smartest person in the room, but knowing what the room needs…and quietly making it happen.