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 evalua ...Read More

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: ...Read More

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 run ...Read More

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 g ...Read More

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 sho ...Read More

I think about this across three dimensions that evolve as you grow: Start with the outcome, not the metric. Before picking KPIs, I ask: "If we were wildly successful this half, what's the ideal outcome for customers using our product?" Any metric is a proxy. The ideal outcome is the real goal. This reframing prevents teams from optimizing for numbers that look good but don't move the business. Three dimensions of success: Impact. Are we moving the needle for customers and the business? I limit t ...Read More