Episode 117: Answering Questions About Successful Career Changes and Managing People Efficiently

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about how to choose the best product career path, escape your career trap, and why a product manager can become a senior faster in a startup.

Q&A:

Q: As a product manager at a company that prioritizes product discovery, experimentation, and collaboration, I’m faced with a dilemma. Which product career path will have the greatest long-term impact? I come from a previous company that was more of a feature factory, where, despite having a higher role and greater control over processes, I could not change the mindset of valuing customers over outputs. However, my ex-employer has asked if I want to come back and drive a big product management change. While the opportunity to drive change and take on a leadership role is tempting, I worry about returning to the same problems. Although I have learned and grown in my current role, the potential for personal growth and business impact in the long term is uncertain, as there are many people in the company over 500, and the previous employer was relatively small, 20+ in a business unit, but had limited mentors. Can you help me weigh the pros and cons of each option?
A: I give individual contributors this advice, and it’s a little bit different for leaders. But I feel like it’s worth saying if you’re an individual contributor and you’re stuck at a place where it’s not really doing great product management, and you’re like, should I stick around and try to change the culture, or should I go somewhere that’s doing it well, my advice for them is, do you want to be a change agent and do you have the authority to actually enact change? Or do you want to be a great product manager? As leaders, we do have to enact a lot of change. So you need to be a change agent, but sometimes those paths are rockier in certain companies than others. So that’s really where this comes down to.
Q: Despite years of writing and speaking by product management thinkers like yourself and Marty, there are still many feature factories in my city. I would say that the majority of companies are feature factories. There are many product managers who follow PM thought leaders and understand what good product management looks like. But I haven’t been lucky enough to work in that environment. What would your advice be to one of those product managers who is trying to escape the feature factory hell and ascend to empowered team nirvana? How do you think an applicant can overcome that disadvantage when applying for jobs at good product management companies? How do you escape the career trap?
A: I’m just going to say that I would love it if all companies were not feature factories anymore. But the majority of them still are. What I think you could do is concentrate on what you can control in your current job and make it a good story. So look at what you have control over and if you’re applying as an individual contributor, it’s like working with your teams. How do you prioritize your work? How do you set goals? How do you do those things? Talk about what you can execute and how you do them well. Talk about how you did experiments in challenging environments, right? Talk about how you worked with your developers well. Talk about how you worked with the leadership team to pull OKRs out of them even if they didn’t want to do it right. Turn that into a story.
Q: One of my product managers is asking me what he needs to do to become a senior product manager and get this new title as a result of his next performance review. Our structure is small. Only three product teams. So there really won’t be a change of responsibilities from moving from Product Manager to Senior Product Manager unless we grow. It would just be a change of title. I tend to think that no matter how well this person is doing, to be considered a senior PM, you need at least four to five years of experience. It is weird to call someone senior with less than three years of experience on the job. Is it the same for a startup as for a bigger company? Can a PM become a senior faster in a startup? Any tips on measuring the seniority of a Product Manager?
A: In startup environments, people can get to the senior title faster than in a big company. Why? Because you ship faster, you do things faster, and you actually produce. So I would not go on complete time here. I wouldn’t look at that. If the person is performing at the level of a Senior Product Manager, they deserve that title. And you do see people level up in startups way faster than big companies because they can produce ten times as much as a big company does because you can ship faster. Besides that, why does this person want to be a Senior Product Manager? Do they feel like they’re actually doing the role of a Senior Product Manager? When I look at Senior Product Managers, they’re doing the same things as a product manager, but they need really little oversight. They need a little coaching on individual contributor product manager roles. So they know how to do these things cold and they can oversee a really large, complicated scope of product feature set.

Resources:

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