How to justify resume points where you have not created any impact as a PM? You had no choice but to just build these features

Well, hopefully you've created some kind of impact. It may be that it's not obvious what that impact was, but hopefully the company, the product, and the market has done something in your tenure at this organization. Even if you've just executed off of a specific task list of features, hopefully some of them added some value to your community, to your users, and to the outcome of the business. And in that case, I'd highlight what happened to the product while you were there. Did you grow? Did you raise money? Did you achieve an outcome? Was there revenue growth? Point to those things, and people will connect the dots that hopefully your work had something to do with it.

That said, it's always much more ideal to have a very direct link between the stuff that you've done and the outcomes you've driven, which is why I just tell PMs to be laser focused on actual outcomes, rather than checklists and processes. Actually focus on the substance of what you're doing, what you're accomplishing, and the results you're delivering. So best not to find yourself in a situation like this if possible, but if you do, yeah, just do your best and fall back on the broader accomplishments of the organization and try to do better in your next role.

Impact as a PM extends beyond direct revenue or cost savings. Consider these aspects when justifying resume points:

1. User growth or retention: Did the feature help sustain or expand your user base?

2. Engagement: How did the feature affect user interaction with the product?

3. Product value: Did it add foundational elements crucial for long-term success?

4. Competitive parity: Was it necessary to keep pace with market standards?

5. Future potential: Did it lay groundwork for upcoming strategic initiatives?

Focus on the metric you used (or would use) to define success for each feature. Even if you "just built" something, frame it in terms of its intended impact on these broader product and business goals. This approach demonstrates your strategic thinking and ability to align features with overarching objectives, key skills for any PM.

I'd always encourage you to think through impact and understand it before building a feature. Ask whoever is pushing you to build, ask your peers, validate with customers -- do whatever you can to understand and describe the problem your feature is solving for and how you'd measure impact. That said, especially earlier in your career, if you do have features that you think drive no impact, a couple of thoughts to help you think through -

Uplevel your thinking to that of your boss or whoever gave you the feature to build. Think about the context they have on the business and why you think it was important for them to have you build this feature. Think about what assumptions may have been different for them vs. your understanding and try to unpack those differences to the best of your ability. While this may not fully get you to your definition of impact, you may understand the assumptions and expected impact and compare to that. Of course, there is always the option to assume good intent, and think about the best possible outcome for the feature, and measure to that.

When representing on a resume, think about the skill a feature helped you develop or the metrics it did drive, even if not perfect and use that lens to capture how the skills add value to your next role. If you have other features/deliverables/work that actually drove impact, you can easily leave out one or two features that you dont believe had any impact on the customer or business. It's much better to focus on what you did that drove value or helped you learn than being comprehensive in capturing every feature you built on your resume.

This "problem" is not uncommon, especially at junior PM levels. If customer or business impact is unclear, I would recommend speaking to how closely your work aligned with the company’s strategic plans. While your contributions maybe did not have direct impact on customers or the business, you can allude to their indirect impact via supporting top-level corporate initiatives.

Okay, you are not happy with your recent track record - good opportunity to flex your analysis, story telling and “marketer” muscle.

• Goals. These features didn’t seem to support your goal - but they likely supported someone else’s (even if you were unhappy about it)? Demonstrate how you supported supported those goals or how you thought outside of the scope of your immediate team, to support some fellow team.

• Learning. Did these features fail, though you knew this from the start? Focus your story on what your team and organization could learn shipping these features, and how you had a chance to apply this learning to do better in what followed. This could include external (customers) and internal (process, best practices) learning.

• Leadership. You weren’t happy with what sound like a top-down request to build these features. Likely your team wasn’t thrilled either. Tell a story how you helped them to “disagree and commit”, stay motivated and deliver what just needed to be done.

I believe that even in situations where you "had to build the features" you can still show impact. Impact is not just about more users, more dollars for the business - impact can be about learning. If you have to ship features, use the time after you delivered them to learn and to bring that learning back to the organisation to impact the future roadmap.

For example - you shipped feature x because you had to but you can still show whether feature x was impactful or not and why it was impactful or not. This information can inform others how to be make better choices in the future and allow you to impact the organisation with insights as well as actual outcomes.