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

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. 

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.

Being a manager of PMs is a completely different job, with substantially different performance indicators than being an IC PM. For example, there is no way I can be the deepest expert in all areas of the product or customer personas; my utility on these matters is limited to sniffing out what I suspect might be the ground truth on something and helping folks to optimize their research/understanding along the lines of that suspicion.

If I am effectively doing my job as a director of PM, there should be three characteristics of my team that I see:

• Autonomy in execution: PMs that work for me are decisive in making decisions in their area, and they have a good sense of what decisions I'll want to review but which ones they can make on their own. The latter should comprise about 80-90% and are largely routine, two-way-door (reversible) decisions. Now, this doesn't mean PMs won't consult me for advice about their area, but I always make it clear: they own the decisions for their areas but with that autonomy comes also living with the consequences.

• Culture of innovation: We should have a robust ideas backlog that doesn't just comprise ideas originated from myself or the executive team. PM's workloads should be a mix of short-term things they're executing on, plus Horizon 2 or Horizon 3 projects they are researching.

• Team is delivering outcomes, not just outputs: Almost the only thing I can do scalably and repeatably is to coach the team and unblock them where I can; execution is up to them. My KPIs are essentially their KPIs; if they have picked realistic yet aggressive outcome-based measures for their work, and are hitting them post-launch, then all of my coaching and advice has been successful.

You should be thinking of your product management career as a story and be thinking about what the headlines and chapter headings for each one of those stories is. What are the sound bites of the things that you accomplish in each chapter of your career journey? Those should be big and progressively getting bigger as you get more senior.

For example

• Tripled SaaS revenue over two years from 25MM to 75MM.

• Grew the size of the product management organization from 5 to 15.

• Won Gartner MQ 3 years running

• Eliminated $12MM in opex, leading to GM improvement from 8% to 12% and putting us over the rule of 40

Thinking about those metrics and planning them out will allow you to tell a story throughout your career that shows increasingly bigger outcomes being driven on bigger scales. I can tell you that when folks call me for executive jobs, what they are typically asking, and I think this applies for any people management job and product, the scope of responsibility that you had. And typically that's measured by number of reports in your organization and the rough amount of revenue that you drive. That's what folks care about for directors, senior directors, VPs, and CPOs. So the sooner you can start to be thinking about, okay, how are those headlines going to reflect my ability to increase the size of the revenue we're doing, the market we're capturing, and the business outcomes delivering, the better.

Early in my career I was really focused on what I was delivering - I wanted to work on big, user facing initiatives. Now, I measure my success by the impact I'm making to the business and to our customers. I jump at the chance to work on anything (front end, back end, processes, etc) that will move the needle for them.

For early career IC product managers, success is measured consistently with how you manage the product lifecycle, pace of delivery, the value of features you deliver to users, and how they contribute to growing the overall business. For me, I added 2 unique criteria to evaluating my success as a PM: GSD-ness and Catalyst.

• GSD-ness is your 'getting sh*t done' meter. When executives have a complex project that needs to be done on an aggressive timeline, do they think of you as the person who can get it done despite the difficulty? Being the person who can consistently deliver things, no matter how complex, across the finish line in a high-quality way, was what helped me a lot early in my career.

• Catalyst is another qualitative measure for whether you're someone who people want to work with because the work you do accelerates their professional and career growth. The way I like to think about this is whether engineers and designers go out of their way to request to be on your project/team. For clarity, this is not a measure of likability, but more a measure of leading things to success which attracts and inspires others around you.

Basically, take on complex projects and deliver them at a high-velocity while having fun through the process!

As the scope of my role has grown, the success criteria have shifted from tactical delivery towards business impact. More specifically:

• Product Innovation: Constantly re-assessing our market and thinking about new product opportunities for expanding our TAM and increasing value for users. What new things can we launch to extend the platform?

• Strategic Alignment: This involves aligning with cross-functional leaders from Marketing and Revenue to make sure that we're all working towards the same company goals and that they're aware of the work my team's doing to contribute towards them. Specifically, the tradeoffs we're making and why.

• Organizational Health: Evaluating the heartbeat across teams to understand the biggest points of friction that decelerate development, getting a sense of the morale of the team, and soliciting feedback to identify opportunities for improvement.

I do an introspective exercise with my manager every 6 months by asking the question - "What if I vanished off the face of the earth tomorrow? Would the business/company be ok?". If the answer is "yes", you need to expand the scope of your responsibilities or find a role where you can have more impact.