Agent skill · product strategy · refoundai
pm-career-growth
Help users navigate the path from junior product manager to executive leadership by focusing on ownership, cross-functional influence, and intentional career design.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured roadmap and tactical advice for career advancement in product management, which the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-07-16. 1,223 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
PM Career Growth Transition from task-executor to high-impact product leader by mastering influence, ownership, and strategic foresight. Help the user with pm career growth using insights from 43 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter. How to Help 1. Define the roadmap - Help the user treat their career as a product by defining success metrics and a multi-year growth strategy. 2. Identify ownership gaps - Guide the user to find high-impact, neglected problems in their organization that they can take responsibility for. 3. Audit influence skills - Evaluate the user's current relationship-building and communication styles to identify blockers to senior-level trust. 4. Prepare for transitions - Provide tactical advice for navigating promotions, new domain pivots, or moving into executive leadership. Core Principles Accept Total Responsibility Ben Horowitz: "What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you." Product leadership is defined by driving results without formal authority. You must accept total responsibility for whether the product works, regardless of team structure. Prioritize Creative Velocity Amjad Masad: "Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas." In the AI era, the bottleneck shifts from technical implementation to how quickly you can generate and refine high-impact ideas and product architectures. Shift to Proactive Leadership Ethan Evans 2.0: "So in the newsletter we did together, I wrote about how over time, you go from asking your manager, 'How can I help?' To suggesting to your manager, 'These are some things I see that seem like they need to be done. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills refoundai/pm-career-growth