How To Choose a Job Like a Real Product Person
I wrote on Twitter about my recent epiphany of how valuable it is at a senior level, to clear time and space for yourself to explore when changing roles in your career.
One thing I wanted to dive deeper with is evaluating your choices as you start getting further along the road with prospective employers — all with pros and cons that are hard to benchmark against each other.
Luckily, us Product people are not new to this game: evaluating between apples-to-oranges strategic options is a fundamental skill for us.
To keep my head clear, I built myself a little prioritization matrix to help drive my own process of what characteristics I want to prioritize, how I rate the different companies I’m engaged in conversations with, and find what truly matters.
It’s been so incredibly helpful that I wanted to open source it for you to use.
You can download / copy the spreadsheet here:
📥 Job Opportunity Prioritization Matrix Template 📈
Key Considerations
Characteristics
I’ve left the things that are on my mind when assessing a company. The first thing you need to do on your end is list out all the things you care about in a company / role. Please be as exhaustive as makes sense. This will help you significantly in forcing yourself to look at the companies objectively.
Weights
Here’s where you get to do some profound soul-searching:
What is the proportional importance of different characteristics of a company / role for you?
There’s no hard guidelines here. If you want to make everything 100% (and are new to the concept of “priorities”), go ahead and do that. But for the best results, force yourself to think closely about what matters more — and what less.
Even if a characteristic is somewhat of an afterthought, include it, but at a significantly lower weight. Those do add up and in an “all things being equal” scenario, might end up as a tie-breaker.
Scores
I’ve stuck to a 1–5 scale here, but you do you.
The most important thing is to find the right level of approximation between the different options. Especially on your first pass, don’t sweat the minutiae of your scale too much. As long as you’re somewhat comfortable with the proportional scores between different options.
Ambiguity and Ongoing Revisions
This is not an exact science, even though numbers are involved. You will never ever be able to assess an opportunity thoroughly from the outside, so the scores will always be somewhat “best guess”.
When I add a new opportunity to the sheet, especially if we’re early on in the process, I bias quite heavily on 3’s across the board.
This gives me a ton of guidance on what I need to work on in further conversations to figure out with the companies.
Any 1’s indicate I want to do some deep dives on an area of concern. Maybe I’ve been hasty at judging them.
Any 3’s indicate that I might not have gone deep enough to assess a company on a characteristic.
Any 5’s indicate a red flag of me being a bit too in love with a company and I need to go into devil’s advocate mode for that characteristic.
This helps create a map for future conversations.
UPDATE: Here’s a really good article from my former colleague Shane Westra that captures very well why it’s so important to take a measured look at your career decision.
Please let me know if you end up using this tool in any of your future decisions — opportunities or otherwise. I’m a huge believer in prioritization matrixes as a driver of complex decision making in general and I’m thrilled I’ve been able to use it to this degree in my personal life as well.
Also, if you end up branching this out and refining it further, please get in touch and we can keep iterating on the Ultimate Job Decider Tool!
