Not Agents. Agency.
Most senior PMs are working hard at doing the job they were given. What gets you to product leader isn’t a better version of that. It’s a different kind of work entirely, and it starts with you.
A few weeks ago I was invited to a fireside chat at a company that brought me in for their internal product guild kickoff. The room was full of senior PMs and product leaders, and most of the conversation circled around the questions everyone is asking right now: What does product look like in the AI era, how are agents changing the role, where does this all go from here.
Then someone asked a different question that seemed to have come from past discussions, but I was happy to see that people still care about it:
“What’s the most important skill for a product manager who wants to become a director?”
I could think of many answers, but since I had to choose just one, I didn’t need to think further.
The one thing is agency.
The more I’ve sat with it since, the more it feels like the question senior PMs are not asking themselves enough, and the answer is something many of them don’t recognize in themselves.
In today’s world so much effort is going into how we can do our job better. But between product management and product leadership, the job is different, and that’s the real challenge.
Be the one who solves things
Years ago, during a leadership program at eBay, there was a panel with senior VPs from across eBay and PayPal, back when they were still one company. Someone asked what actually drives people upward inside large organizations.
Their answers all circled the same idea.
The people who get pulled up are the ones who can solve problems. When they notice or are assigned a gap, they step into it, and make things move even when it sits outside their defined role. Once you become that person, people start bringing you bigger and messier problems. The next role follows naturally.
I see the same distinction in the two programs I run.
In the Product Leadership Launchpad for senior PMs, participants often arrive with a student posture. They write down every word, ask for templates, ask exactly what to send, sometimes literally saying, “tell me what to do.”
In the CPO Bootcamp, the room feels completely different. People come to take. “I need this.” “Give me that.” “This is the problem I’m trying to solve.”
In the same setting, people at different levels behave differently.
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That’s exactly what agency means: entering the room already holding responsibility for the outcome.
Even if you weren’t asked to
In your work, you already own a lot. You dive deep into your tasks. You research, you execute, you catch what isn’t working and raise the flag.
From the outside, this looks like everything good about a senior PM. From the inside, it feels like doing the job exactly right.
The trap is that the job you are doing is the one someone else already defined for you.
Years ago, a manager told me I required a lot of management. Ouch. At the time, I did not understand what she meant, and pointed the finger back at her: Isn’t management exactly her job?
Over a dozen years later, I see it differently.
While she could have been more supportive, what she tried to say was that she was carrying the part where she had to figure out what to ask of me, what to point me toward, what to notice on my behalf. I was great at executing once she had already done that work, but the work she was doing was the work she wanted me to do.
Even if it’s not yours
As product people we formally own very little. Sales owns sales. Engineering owns the architecture. Marketing owns positioning. And when you don’t have formal authority over something, it is easy to also let go of the responsibility for it.
It feels reasonable. It feels like respecting boundaries.
But that’s not something you can afford to do as a product leader.
A product leader I am guiding ran into this recently. His founder told him to let a colleague run sales, and that he didn’t need to be involved. He wanted to, but he also felt that it made his job more difficult. He tried to respect the boundary, but knew this would hurt his ability to bring the results he was expecting.
This is where the distinction between managing, owning, and enabling starts to matter.
A product leader owns product success. Product success is made up of many moving parts, most of which are not yours to manage, but that doesn’t remove the responsibility for them. You own what you can. You enable what you can’t, asking the hard questions, nudging the right conversations, making sure things are pointed in the right direction.
The authority gets distributed across functions, but the responsibility for product success stays with you.
The product leader isn’t the person who got the role, but the one who was already doing the work before anyone made it official.
In a world where agents will keep doing more work for you, you need to work on what they can’t do.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on May 28, 2026.
