Understand impact & opportunity
Recap of my conversations from the past few weeks
I wasn’t sure what response I would get to my offer to book time on my calendar to chat with me. I have to say; I was blown away by the response. Thank you to the community to help me pay it forward and learn in the process.
Needless to say, I’ve had great conversations with amazing product managers the last few weeks.
The primary question that came about in these discussions was around career growth - how do I get to the next level? What has to be true for it to be non-linear?
My advice based on my experience is 2-fold:
Understand your impact to the top priorities
We may get caught up in the day-to-day execution thinking we’re having an amazing impact and so my career will certainly take a non-linear path. You can’t assume that.
You need to raise your head and understand whether what you are driving is truly moving the business metrics and where does it stack in the company’s priorities. I don’t mean the gazillion priorities a company has but the top 3-5 that the company truly cares about. If you want your career to be non-linear then your focus also needs to be on things that will take the company on a non-linear path and usually, they come as the top company priorities.
The impact needs to be measurable - clearly articulate the input metric you’re driving and landing that moves the output metric.Understand the opportunity to grow
You cannot assume that your current company has the opportunity and/or the budget to move you to the next level of your career. If it does then great, but I see it quite often that the company doesn’t have enough opportunities for its folks to grow. The company may not be moving at the pace you want to move at. So, you need to assess that, ask straight up to your management whether there is an opportunity for you to grow and take on more and if there is what is it? Ask the deep questions just like the company would ask you about the business metrics.
Just to illustrate a point in case, I remember from my time at Microsoft where it was very explicitly stated that you can’t move to partner level unless another partner left the org - there was a hard # based on the org and there were already people ahead of you in the queue! This rule may have changed since I left, but you get my point, the opportunity needs to exist on your terms.
Do yourself a favor, get more explicit about what career path you want and understand your impact and opportunity.
Want to chat about your specific case - grab time on my calendar here. It’s completely free.