Should a product manager go into management or stay an individual contributor?

They are different jobs, not sequential ones

The framing of management as promotion is a leftover from organisations with no other way to increase someone's scope. In a company with a genuine principal track, both are ways to have more impact and they require almost disjoint skills.

Management: hiring, developing people, allocating work, resolving conflict, representing the team upward, and building the conditions in which other people do good product work. Your output is what your team produces.

Senior IC: the hardest, most ambiguous, most cross-cutting product problems. The ones spanning teams, or that nobody has been able to make progress on. Your output is still your own thinking.

The honest daily comparison

A manager's day is largely conversations: one-to-ones, hiring loops, calibration, unblocking, stakeholder alignment. Progress is measured in weeks and is mostly other people's.

A principal's day still contains research, analysis, writing and product decisions. The problems are harder and slower, but the feedback loop is direct.

The choice reduces to something quite personal: does it satisfy you when someone on your team ships something good, roughly as much as when you ship something good yourself? Genuine yes points to management. Reluctant yes usually does not survive contact with the job.

What each requires that people underestimate

Management requires tolerating being one step removed, and the specific discomfort of watching someone solve a problem differently — and often more slowly — than you would have, and not taking it back. The instinct to take it back is what makes strong ICs into weak managers.

Senior IC requires influence without authority, permanently. You have no reporting line and must move an organisation by argument, evidence and relationships. Reddit's reliance on volunteer moderators is a structural analogue: enormous influence, no authority, and it works only through credibility.

The company question comes first

Before choosing, find out whether the IC track is real where you are. Ask what levels exist above principal, who currently holds them, what they work on, and how their compensation compares to directors.

If the answer is thin, the IC track is aspirational rather than actual, and choosing it means choosing to plateau or to move. That is a legitimate choice, but make it knowingly.

Switching is normal

People move between the tracks more often than the ladder diagram suggests, and doing so is not a demotion. The version that goes badly is switching by attrition — staying in management long past the point of disliking it because leaving looks like failure.

Deciding deliberately, and saying plainly that the other work suits you better, costs very little and is generally respected.