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How do you measure your own success in your role and how much have those performance indicators evolved as you grew within your role?

Natalia Baryshnikova
Natalia Baryshnikova
Atlassian Head of Product, Enterprise AgilityNovember 9

As a general manager, I own specific business goals and outcomes that I need to achieve, and am responsible for on an organization level. Those goals are very specific and measurable, so I always know where I stand on them. As a team leader, I measure success through my team's happiness, proficiency, ability to grow their careers, and our ability to scale the team (e.g. we can quickly and effectively onboard new team members and set them up for success). As a product manager, I tie my own evaluation of success to value I deliver to my customers (measured both qualitatively and quantitatively) and to learning - I love to learn as most product people do, and how much have I learned and whether I have gotten a better as a PM, teammate, team leader and general manager is the lens I see my succes thorugh. Those success measurements have been fairly consistent over time, but I started practicing them in "chunks" - first the PM set when I was an individual PM, then the leader one when I started managing a team, then the GM one when I started running a business unit. 

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Nicolas Liatti
Nicolas Liatti
Adobe Senior Director of Product Management, 3D CategoryJuly 10

The way how you measure your own success depends on the criteria you have for yourself.

However, I think it's very important to know that when you go into the PM career that there are some specificities: this is a late reward career.

Being a PM is not like an engineer or a designer or a sales where you produce outputs. The way how you measure success for a PM over time usually take years, to measure impacts that you brought with products.

For myself I use 2 indicators to measure my own success: the impact from the products I am overseeing, and the impact from products coming from PMs I had the chance to coach over time.

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