24.5 Excelling As A PM
You don't just want to get a PM role. You want to do very well in your PM role and enjoy a long and successful career. But one of the contradictions about product management is this—you depend on others to complete your work, but are also expected to be able to work very independently. It's a tricky balance. You need to do your job well, even though so much of implementing your vision actually depends on what others do.
How can you ensure that you're on the right track to hit the next tier of the PM career ladder? How can you get recognized for your accomplishments? What are some strategies you can use to grow your area of responsibility? How can you increase your exposure to people around your company? This very last (!) checkpoint will attempt to answer these questions, and equip you with everything you need to know to excel and move higher in your PM career.
By the end of this checkpoint, you should be able to do the following:
- Describe and apply strategies for gaining recognition, raises, and promotions as a PM
Getting recognition as a PM
The best way to build a great reputation as a product manager is to ship impactful changes—ones that are achieving your OKRs and hitting your KPIs. To put it a different way, your job is to achieve the goals of your company. Not every change you push is going to be a success, but you need to hit the mark regularly and in a meaningful way.
As mentioned before, building a reputation can be a cause of stress. Maybe a feature you thoughtfully researched, designed, and shipped didn't achieve the goals you set for it. And now you're running out of time in the quarter to hit your OKRs. And worse, your success as a PM isn't entirely up to you; you're dependent on your teammates, coworkers, and users to achieve those goals.
Here's the thing: being a successful PM means that you align your goals to create successful outcomes. Such an alignment requires that you understand and communicate your goals, that you seek responsibility and exposure within your organization, and that you track your accomplishments. The more consistently you focus on these elements of your professional growth, the more likely you are to gain recognition and success. If you want a raise or promotion, you'll need to demonstrate that you're capable of doing work at the level of that higher salary or title.
Understand your goals
Goals come in different forms. You want to make sure you understand the differences between various goals so that you can address them in a coordinated way. Your goals should align with several factors:
- The responsibilities of your current job
- The responsibilities of your next promotion
- Your OKRs for the current quarter (or whatever time period you're using to measure them)
- Your company's goals for the current quarter
- Your company's long-term strategy
- The tasks that your manager or executives assign to you
- Building a positive reputation among your coworkers
Your coworkers are a crucial part of your future success. In most companies when you're getting your annual or promotion review, they will seek the opinion of people who work with you on a regular basis. If you want them to give you a glowing recommendation, you need to manage those relationships well. And this doesn't just include your developers and designers, but all the people you work with on a regular basis, including salespeople, marketing, operations, and support.
When it comes to thinking about how your goals align with the responsibilities of your next promotion, that means you probably won't be promoted unless you demonstrate that you can do the work of your next title. You're not entitled to a promotion just because you're doing the work of your current job. You need to show that you'll succeed in a role that requires more responsibility. The best way to do that is to already be doing the work of that next job.
Discuss your goals and growth regularly
On that note, the best way to tell whether or not you're meeting your current and future responsibilities is to discuss this regularly with your manager. Here are some useful questions you can ask your manager to assess where you are in your goals and growth:
- Am I on track with where you expect me to be in my role or career?
- Which skills or responsibilities am I excelling at?
- Which skills or responsibilities do I need to improve?
- What are some of the goals I need to achieve to get a promotion or raise?
- How can I improve [some goal or objective that you're struggling with]?
One of the realities of jobs is that there is often a gap between the job description and the job you actually end up doing. Your manager is the best person to help you get these factors into alignment. In the end, your boss's assessment of you will matter more to your career than anyone else's, so choose your next boss wisely. And as soon as you're on the job, use your relationship with them to help you get on the right track.
Increase your exposure
It's really tempting to spend your free time digging into the database or analyzing that new feature. However, that isn't always the best way to set yourself up for success in your career.
Make sure you're allocating time to consider the relationships you're building. Putting yourself out there as the public face of your product is a great way to address that. The more people view you as the go-to person for your product, the more likely you are to hear feedback. This knowledge will set you up to make the best decisions for your product and foster greater success.
How can you build up that exposure and become everyone's go-to person? First, overcommunicate about your product—new features, roadmap plans, upcoming launches—to your most important stakeholders around the company. Second, find opportunities to work with teams around your company on projects like roadmaps, goal setting, social groups, or crucial initiatives. Invite people to help you with your work by asking for feedback on upcoming designs, roadmap plans, or even testing a feature. Even if you feel like your plans are strong, engaging with stakeholders will promote their buy-in and personal investment in your product's success. It reinforces you as the go-to person for your product, and it makes your job easier.
Growing in your role
Getting recognition is a good first step toward excelling in your role. But to succeed in the long run, you need to track the impact of your work and be able to communicate your accomplishments. And you'll want to progressively take on more responsibility so that you can demonstrate your readiness for higher levels of the career ladder. Here's how to do that.
Track your accomplishments
When an annual review or promotion opportunity rolls around, you'll be asked to list your accomplishments. In particular, you need to show that your accomplishments are in line with what is expected of your role and beyond. That means you should keep track of everything you accomplish. Don't depend on your boss or coworkers to keep track of what you've done.
Start a document to record everything meaningful that you've accomplished, no matter how big or small. When an opportunity comes around—whether it's a promotion possibility at your current job or your next job search—you'll have a giant list to pull from. If you don't do this, then you'll have to spend hours thinking back over a year or more about everything you've done, if you even can remember it. Maintaining this list can also help you keep track of links, documents, user comments, or analytics showing the positive impact your actions had, and other details that would be hard to recall later.
Keep in mind that accomplishments can be big or small. Big accomplishments could be hitting your OKRs every quarter. Small achievements include things like improving your presentation skills at team meetings. If you've done this right, it should be easy for you to use this list to find the biggest things you've done and the initiatives you led that had long-term benefits for your team.
Expand your responsibilities
If you have a good manager, they'll ask you to take on new responsibilities as they see you're capable of doing so. But not every manager will be so thoughtful. If you have aspirations, you need to take responsibility for increasing the scope of your work.
One way to do this is to take on more work. You can ask your manager if there's anything you can do for them. They often have lots of work to do and would appreciate the help. Tackling some of their responsibilities will also help you grow in your role. A good way to ask this is, "Is there any work I can take off your plate?" You can also identify areas of work that interest you and ask if there's a way for you to get more involved in them.
Another way of increasing the scope of your responsibilities is to volunteer for and accept open tasks when they come along. For example, your boss might mention at a team meeting that there's an opportunity for someone to go to a career fair and recruit new PM interns next week. Say yes, as long as you can both do that and take care of all your other work. You'll get new experience and a fresh perspective, while also solving a problem for your boss and demonstrating that you're a team player.
A crucial part of being successful when taking on new responsibilities is that you need to follow through on the new responsibility and avoid neglecting all of your other work. Don't drop the ball! If you take on a new task but don't complete it or fail to meet your core responsibilities, the result will be worse than if you never asked for more work to begin with.
Practice ✍️
In your notebook or other document, write short responses to the following prompts:
- As this checkpoint mentions, a big part of your success as a PM will depend on your boss, team members, and coworkers. As you go on job interviews, what should you be looking for? What questions can you ask to find out if the people you will work with will enable and support your quest for success? Make a list.
- While written specifically from a PM perspective, the information in this checkpoint applies to non-PM jobs as well. Look back at your previous jobs and consider which parts of this you have been doing well. Could you have applied some of these strategies better? Reflect on what you would do differently in your next role, and how you plan to set yourself up for long-term success.