By Ben Chisell
The road to the top rarely runs in a straight line, but there are less circuitous routes to becoming CEO. According to one of the largest ongoing studies analyzing every CEO succession in the S&P 500 since 2000, there are four feeder roles: COOs, divisional CEOs, CFOs, and “leapfrog” leaders promoted from below the C-suite.
But a separate 10-year study called the CEO Genome Project suggests that the fastest climbers ± “sprinters” who reached the CEO seat well ahead of the 24-year average — didn’t get there by climbing the corporate ladder to the top. They got there through bold, often unconventional career moves, such as taking on a failing division or building something from scratch.
In fact, what set them apart wasn’t pedigree but building a specific skillset that made them CEO material: decisiveness, reliability, adaptability, and the ability to engage people around a plan.
Product management doesn’t appear in the CEO-pathway research, likely because none of the major studies breaks the role out as a separate category. It’s a relatively newer function, and it tends to get folded into general management or engineering in career datasets.
But once you look at what the job demands — ownership of a tangible outcome, obsession with what customers value, the willingness to make tough decisions — it maps directly onto the traits the CEO Genome Project found in its sprinters.
I’ve spent my career leading product and technology at companies including Amazon, eBay, Starling Bank and OakNorth. Those roles landed me my first CEO position without having to fill the typical CEO-starter pack jobs because I was able to articulate my skill set to the board.
In short, product management is about making a product successful; being CEO is about making a business successful. The ingredients are the same.
Don’t take my word for it. Sundar Pichai joined Google in 2004, leading product management for the Google Toolbar, years before he became CEO. Neal Mohan spent eight years as YouTube’s chief product officer before taking the top job there in 2023.
Yes, the scope of the job differs, but that’s true of every promotion, especially for the hardest job on offer. A CEO carries the full weight of the business: financial performance, legal and regulatory exposure, the board, and the market. A PM’s remit is naturally narrower: one product, one roadmap, one team to rally.
But scope isn’t the same as skillset. The job gets bigger, but the muscles you exercise remain the same: setting a vision under uncertainty, prioritizing ruthlessly, making calls with incomplete information, and getting people who don’t report to you to deliver anyway. Learn to do that for a product, and you’ve already learned to do it for a business, just on a bigger scale.
That mindset isn’t new to start-ups and scale-ups either, where a PM is often the closest thing to a mini-CEO, making calls across product, growth, and operations simply because no dedicated function exists yet to do it for them.
Part of the reason I think the PM-to-CEO pathway is so often overlooked is that the function is judged by its worst practitioners. Plenty of people with “product manager” on their CV spend more time managing processes and stakeholders than owning outcomes and building amazing products. And it’s that version of the job that shapes how PMs get perceived, and why few are inspired to make the leap. The PMs who have done the job – by taking ownership of the outcome rather than the process – are building something that truly resembles the job description of a CEO.
The best advice I can give to aspiring executives and entrepreneurs today – whether they’re PMs or not – is to choose a metric that they want to be accountable for. In my previous role, I focused on monthly active users; now I’m focusing on EBITDA. Strip away the layers and remain outcome-oriented.
The CEO pathway research keeps looking for the right sequence of job titles, but that model is increasingly outdated in the modern-day work environment. Rather than focusing on traditional CEO pathways, aspiring executives should focus less on glitzy job titles to add to their CVs and more on the concrete skills they can gain. Product management, done properly, offers the perfect crash course.
Ben Chisell is the CEO of Paysend, a London-based technology company building a global payments infrastructure to facilitate money transfers. He previously led product and technology for companies including Amazon, eBay, Starling Bank and OakNorth.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
