To become a more effective leader with a holistic business view, deliberately seek experience across various interconnected functions like operations, marketing, and sales. This strategy prevents the narrow perspective that often limits specialized leaders, even if it requires taking lateral or junior roles to learn.

The path to senior engineering levels is tied to the scope of your work's influence. Rather than explicitly seeking promotions, focus on projects with natural potential to grow from solving a team's problem to solving an organization's. The promotions will follow the impact.

The traditional product management skillset is no longer sufficient for executive leadership. Aspiring CPOs must develop deep expertise in either the commercial aspects of the business (GTM, revenue) or the technical underpinnings of the product to provide differentiated value at the C-suite level.

TikTok's Sofia Hernandez grew her remit from marketing to commercial partnerships by identifying and solving broader business needs. Instead of waiting for a promotion, she built relationships across orgs and demonstrated value, making her scope expansion a natural outcome of her contributions.

Don't wait for a senior title to think strategically. Junior PMs should stretch beyond pure delivery and engage with customer discovery, business context, and pain points to build the strategic skills necessary for advancement.

The key mindset shift for a CPO is moving from focusing on the product to focusing on the business. The product organization becomes the primary lever you pull to achieve business goals, but your lens changes from product outcomes to overall business health and performance.

At the VP or C-level, a leader's primary role shifts from managing their function to driving overall business success. Their focus becomes more external—customers, market, revenue—and their success is measured by their end-to-end impact on the company, not just their team's performance.

As you move up the product ladder, your strategic time horizon expands. ICs and Directors focus on quarters, VPs on the year, and CPOs must own the 3-5 year vision. Thinking long-term is a core CPO responsibility that no one else in the product organization will own.

For early-career professionals, success isn't just about task mastery. It's about understanding how your specific role contributes to the firm's broader commercial engine. This holistic view allows you to spot opportunities and develop a unique, value-added perspective on solving client problems.