Twice in five years I've inherited the same job under a different name: turn "Product Owner" into "Product Manager" and make the new title mean something. Iress in 2021, a scaling multi-product business with 30+ product folks. Tyro in 2025, a payments and banking fintech with a product team under 10. Same transition, opposite starting conditions, and the frameworks we built couldn't have looked more different.
Option 01
Iress, 2021: designing for the org you already have
30+ PMs spread across a multi-product portfolio need one shared language, not a dozen local ones. Growing@Iress deliberately built something light: a five-rung, dual-track ladder (people track and practice track) from Analyst through to Head of Product, run through self-assessment paired with a People Leader, reviewed at least once a year. One line does a lot of work in that deck: "the capabilities framework is NOT a performance benchmarking tool." At that scale, nuance had to live in the coaching relationship, not in the document. The framework's job was consistency. The manager's job was judgement.
Iress career path (2021)
| Track | Progression |
|---|---|
| Practice focus | Analyst → Associate Product Manager → Product Manager → Senior Product Manager |
| People focus | Product Lead (leads a group of APMs/PMs) → Head of (leader of leaders, portfolio or region) → Global Leadership (Global Heads of, CPO) |
Movement wasn't strictly one-directional. A Senior Product Manager could step into Product Lead or, in some cases, straight into a Head of role, depending on where their strengths actually sat. The two tracks existed so craft and people leadership weren't forced into a single, one-size ladder.
Option 02
Tyro, 2025: designing for the org you're building toward
Sub-10 PMs, and on paper, a rubric that looks built for a company ten times that size: a near-full Google-style ladder, seven IC levels from APM through Distinguished PM, mirrored manager titles, four craft pillars including End-to-End Ownership that folds in GTM, risk, and banking-rule obligations directly into the PM role. The detail runs deep: audience size you can credibly present to, whether founders trust your judgement unprompted, whether other PMs cite your strategy docs as reference cases. That looks like overkill for ten people. It wasn't, because the team wasn't staying at ten. The mandate from day one was to scale the product org, and it did, to 30+. The rubric was built for the destination, not the departure gate.
Tyro IC ladder (2025)
| Level | IC title | Manager-track equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Associate Product Manager (APM) | n/a |
| 2 | Product Manager | n/a |
| 3 | Senior Product Manager | n/a |
| 4 | Staff Product Manager | n/a |
| 5 | Principal Product Manager | Group Product Manager |
| 6 | Senior Principal Product Manager | Senior Group Product Manager |
| 7 | Distinguished Product Manager | Head of Product |
Seven levels for a team that started under ten people. The manager track only branches off from level five onward, which was deliberate: below that, the craft ladder and the leadership ladder are the same conversation.
The pattern underneath both isn't "big org, light rubric; small org, heavy rubric." It's that a framework can describe two different things, and confusing them is the actual failure mode. Iress needed a document that described where the org already was, so 30+ people could have the same growth conversation in the same language. Tyro needed a document that described where the org was headed, so a team of ten wouldn't outgrow their own framework before the company caught up to them. Read backwards, either choice looks wrong. Read against intent, both were right for the job they were doing.
The part neither deck shows: in both rebuilds, the actual work wasn't picking rungs, it was mapping people. Before either framework meant anything, I had to understand each PM's own ambition and where it genuinely lined up against the craft the rubric described. Some wanted the title without the stretch behind it. Some had the craft years ahead of whatever title they'd been given. A rubric only becomes useful once it's translated for one specific person's next conversation. Read cold, it's just an org chart with adjectives.