Notes — Vikrama Dhiman on the Three W’s, PM Career Growth, and Operating as a Product Leader
Four questions [Adler frame]
Q1 — What is it about? A career growth framework for product managers built on three axes: what you produce, what you bring to the table, and what your operating model is. Paired with a diagnostic of the three mindset blockers that cause growth to stall at mid-senior level.
Q2 — How is it argued? Observational: fifteen years watching strong and stalled PM careers, pattern-matched into a named framework. No empirical dataset — Vikrama is honest that this is curated observation from coaching and management. The framework’s structure (three W’s, eight skill axes, three blockers) is taxonomic rather than causal.
Q3 — Is it true? The framework is coherent and matches practitioner experience. The claim that strong PMs never abandon output quality even as they move into strategy is plausible and underemphasised in most career frameworks. The three blockers (control focus, change relationship, self-stories) are more psychological than structural — accurate, but the correction advice (“correct the story”) is light on mechanism. The mindful agency point is well-grounded: high-agency as a self-label can licence brusqueness in ways that reduce collaborative effectiveness.
Q4 — What of it? Useful as a self-audit checklist. The strongest operationalisation: the “Can you show me your last PRD?” test as a proxy for W2 health, and the three operating model tenets as a repeatable reminder before difficult stakeholder conversations.
Glossary
What you produce — the first axis of the Three W’s: outputs (ship something, deliver an artifact), outcomes (own or collaborate on measurable product goals), direction (set or influence strategic direction). All three are active at senior levels, not just the last.
What you bring to the table — the second axis: impact on impact. Demonstrated through the quality of the artifacts you produce — PRDs, product notes, experiment briefs, Jira stories, metrics work — not just through the outcomes of the areas you own.
What’s your operating model — the third axis: how you work with others. Three tenets: raise difficult issues without being difficult, bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself, get decisions made without making all decisions yourself.
Eight skill axes — the dimensions on which PMs are evaluated: data, design/research, technology, strategy, communication, collaboration, organisational skills, community.
Mindful agency — Vikrama’s replacement for “high agency” as a self-description, coined after observing that high-agency culture in Southeast Asian organisations often misread as aggression. Preserves the drive; adds calibration to context and relationship.
Three W’s in detail [§ Key arguments]
W1 — What you produce
The axis most misunderstood by PMs in growth mode. A common failure pattern: as soon as a PM gets comfortable, they shift focus to strategy and stop caring whether their PRD is good. Vikrama inverts this: the most senior PMs he has seen continue to produce sharper artifacts than junior PMs, not fewer. They set the standard rather than delegating it.
The progression within W1 is not linear abandonment (outputs → outcomes → direction) but additive. At senior level you are responsible for direction and outcomes and outputs. “Don’t forget your IC roots.”
W2 — What you bring to the table
Described as “impact on impact”: the question is not whether your product area succeeded but whether your involvement demonstrably improved the outcome. The audit: Can you show me your last PRD? The last product note you circulated? The brief you sent to design on problem ranking? If these documents are thin, missing, or poor, W2 is the growth blocker regardless of outcome quality.
Eight skill axes map to W2: data, design/research, technology, strategy, communication, collaboration, organisational skills, community. Growth: pick the axis with the highest leverage deficit (where you are furthest from the best in industry, not the best on your team), close it, then move to the next.
W3 — What’s your operating model
The three tenets:
- Raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with.
- Bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself.
- Be in charge of getting decisions made, not making all decisions yourself.
These are “easy to say, very hard to embody.” Violating tenet 1 turns a useful PM into an obstacle. Violating tenet 2 turns a well-intentioned PM into a political actor. Violating tenet 3 is the most common failure mode: PMs who try to make all decisions create bottlenecks and burn trust.
Three blockers of PM career growth [§ Career blockers]
Blocker 1 — Focusing outside your control
Early-career PMs are highly focused on the craft (things within their control). As they become mid-senior, the conversation shifts: “Why isn’t the organisation doing this?” “Why won’t this stakeholder change?” The shift is subtle and corrosive. Almost everything that determines career growth — W1, W2, W3 — remains within the PM’s control. Refocusing on those axes restores the growth trajectory.
Blocker 2 — Relationship with change slowing
In the first years, skill acquisition rate is high. Benchmarking against colleagues at the same level gives a false signal that you are improving. The correct benchmark is the best in the industry on each axis. When you benchmark correctly, your score recalibrates downward, revealing where to invest. If you feel you are a four out of five on data within your PM group, start benchmarking against Crystal Widjaja. Your score will fall, which is information.
Blocker 3 — The stories you tell yourself
Self-labels (“I’m a high-agency PM”, “I’m collaborative”) become permission structures for corresponding weaknesses. “High agency” licenses aggression or corner-cutting; “collaborative” licenses indecisiveness. The labels are anti-signals as well as signals. Correcting the story is the precondition for behaviour change: frameworks applied on top of an incoherent self-model do not stick.
Vikrama’s corrective: “I want to be a mindful agency person.” The new term retains the drive of high-agency but adds deliberate attention to context and relationship.