How to plan your growth as a product manager (or product team)
This week marks my 1 year anniversary at Fave, which coincides with my birthday last week.
For the past years, this period has always been very reflective for me as this would usually be the time when I would love out of a role in a new one. I would think about the previous year, all the fuck-ups I had, how I’d grown, and what I would need to improve going into the new role.
This year is the first time that I will not be switching jobs. That does not mean that I should stop planing for my growth.
This week I was given the opportunity by PM School (a close-knit group of people passionate about product management, based out of KL. Find their events here), to talk about how product managers plan their growth at Fave.
In this article, I want to lay out a few methods paired with some tips that could be useful to professionals from all areas. We will be going through four simple steps: Goal-setting, Assessment, Planning, and Execution. I will be showing you some examples as we go along.
Goal-setting
Before you know how you can plan your growth, you need to know what it is you want to achieve. This could be a professional goal, such as getting a promotion, a raise, or to get more responsibility at work, or a personal one about building your personal brand or anything else.
This process can be very different for everyone. You might have your goal crystal clear in your head, or you might be a lost potato. The point of this article is not how to discover your true calling, so I will be brief here.
Yearly reflection exercise
As I was mentioning in the intro of the article, I plan my life on a yearly basis. What helps me do that is the Yearly Reflection Booklet by Hugo Pereira. In its essence, it gives you guidance and asks the right set of questions to “close” your previous year by reflecting on your experiences, the good ones, and the bad ones, what you learned and who helped you along the way.
In the second step, it provides 6 exercises to build your next year’s vision. Along that way, you will identify the experiences you want to have, which areas you want to improve in, and what will be your moonshot goal. This is the part where you can pick any of these moonshot goals to be used for the remainder of this exercise.
Assessment
“The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge its existence”
While this quote might sound a little bleak, it perfectly summarizes the key point: you cannot improve what you don’t know needs improvement. In the previous step you have identified your goal, but you might not be aware of what is holding you back from achieving it. That is why being able to properly assess yourself is key.
If you are a product manager like me, it can get quite overwhelming in what to improve in. As PM’s, we are involved in everything across the product development lifecycle and thus are required to be somewhat competent in a lot of areas, basically being an allrounder.
At Fave, we are using a Growth Competency Framework that is separated into the three P’s of successful product management: Product, Process & People.
For each of the competencies listed above, such as Data, Product Marketing, People Leadership, etc… we have a descriptor for each level of seniority ranging from Associate PM, Product Manager to Senior PM, Principal PM, and lastly Head of Product. You can see some examples listed here:
So how can you use these to identify your growth opportunities?
You can choose to do a self-assessment, peer assessment, manager assessment, or benchmark yourself against others.
- Self-assessment: You basically mark for yourself which level you feel you are in. That does not necessarily have to be your actual job title. It could be that you’re actually performing higher or lower in a certain competency.
The problem with self-assessment is that people usually are overly optimistic, giving themselves very high grades, or pessimistic, giving themselves lower grades. That’s why getting feedback from others and closing your blind-spots is very important. For this, I would propose to select a method below:
- Peer assessment: Together with other PMs that are on a similar level, assess each other. Then you do a round of sharing, where everyone shares the assessment and feedback for one person, before going on to the next. Each person can then compare the feedback with their self-assessment to do a cross-calibration.
- Manager assessment: Make sure to use this only when your manager has seen you deliver a few product cycles before, otherwise it will be hard to assess you fairly.
- Benchmarking: You pick an experienced PM inside or outside your organization that you look up to and ask them for their own self-assessment. That can then serve as a yard-stick of where you are compared to that person.
In case you came to this article hoping to learn how you can create your own PM Growth Competencies Framework, I can highly suggest this article by Sara Wajnberg on how to get started with Product Management leveling at your organization
One year ago, my goal was to become a Senior Product Manager within the next year. There was no way that my manager could assess me since I had just joined the company. So I did my own self-assessment but also asked other PMs in the company that I looked up to. After that, I looked at what are my gaps in becoming an SPM according to the competency framework and aligned with my manager what I would do in the upcoming period to be able to showcase my ability to perform according to these competencies.
Planning
Once you know what are the areas you want to improve in you need to plan how to successfully get there. This can be best achieved by using any one of the well established goal-setting frameworks.
The last time that I did my growth planning, I had realized that I had reached a plateau in my growth as a product manager. I really wanted to grow in the areas of people leadership, but unfortunately, there was no team for me to lead. I figured I needed to go outside of my organization and become a product management instructor to be able to get the experience I needed to grow further as a PM. I wanted to get a gig at any of the existing organizations, such as PM School, Product School, or General Assembly.
I opted to follow the North Star Framework. It follows the simple idea that a certain set of input metrics, carefully selected to contribute to the north star, will automatically lead to that goal — as long as you keep on feeding the north star via your input metrics.
In order to become a product management instructor, I figured I would just need to get a certain amount of exposure and experience through the following steps:
- Writing: By regularly writing articles on everything around product management, just like this one, I would be able to reach a wider audience. I wanted to publish 3 articles in external publications.
- Giving talks: Whenever you have to explain a certain topic to others, you cement the knowledge of that for yourself. You need to anticipate what questions the audience would ask and prepare for that. You become more of an expert in that area. I wanted to give 3 talks.
- Mentorship: The ultimate test. Mentoring people is probably one of the closest ways you can get to becoming an instructor. Helping others solve their challenges would force me to think outside my current context, thus further cementing my skills as a product manager.
Translated into the North Star Framework, it would look like this:
This gave me my plan. I hope my example gave you some insights into how you can break down your goal into more actionable steps.
There are, however, many other frameworks that you could be using. You can use OKRs, SMART goals, the BHAG, golden circle, or just plain common-sense.
Execution
The final step will be to set up your routine and make sure you are able to move towards your goal in small steps every week. You will need someone to keep you accountable. This could be yourself, a co-worker, your manager, or anybody else.
The way I like to do it is to “automate” the steps I need to do. It will take a tremendous amount of energy for you to always keep in mind all the improvement points you want to work on. When I wanted to become an SPM in 1 year, I scheduled a personal weekly planning session, where I would review my OKRs and set an action plan what I could do in each particular week to exhibit the competencies I wanted to grow in.
Additionally, I would proactively ask for a monthly 1:1 with my manager in which I would make it a point to ask for feedback whether I was on track. If I was, all good. When I wasn’t, I would still have enough time to adjust my approach and work harder to be back on track by the next monthly 1:1. If you do this diligently and your manager confirms in every check-in that you are on track, you practically don’t leave them any other choice than to give you what you were working for.
For goals that might not be subject to a manager’s approval, having a monthly review with yourself can still be beneficial to assess whether you are on track and adjust your goal if needed.
The process of Goal-setting, Assessment, Planning & Execution might seem trivial, but the beauty lies in its simplicity. It doesn’t take long to set-up and you can get started immediately. So far it has helped me achieve all the goals that I set out to.
Planning your growth as a product team
As hinted at in the title, the process can also be applied to grow your product team.
Our PM Growth Competency Framework at Fave is designed to plan the growth of individuals. A team, however, is more than just the sum of its individuals. Your team could consist of star employees only, but they might still be clashing and failing to deliver products successfully. For our platform product team, we opted to take the areas of product deliveries and identified attributes of how it is done successfully to create an ideal state of where our team wanted to be.
Assessment
We then ran an exercise where each one of us would rate our team from 1–5 and give examples of why we gave that rating. After everyone shared, we gave the opportunity to adjust one’s rating and then calculated the average.
A different way to do this is to have your stakeholders, like Engineering, QA, business owner, or any other team you work with rate you to get an unbiased opinion.
Planning
Looking at our prioritization, we then selected the top three areas of improvement. Make sure not to pick too many, you don’t want the act of improving your process get in the way of shipping product. We then discussed each area and came up with a few action steps to move forward, and assigned a responsible.
Execution
We simply scheduled bi-weekly check-ins, following up on the defined action steps. If all steps were achieved, we assessed if the problem was solved or needs further action steps.
To summarize, whatever you want to achieve, you simply follow this process. It should be really simple. Everything else will fall into place once you get started. The approach follows the power of visualization. Implementing the steps will ensure that you start planning on how you can achieve your goal, making it feel more attainable. This will not only subconsciously impact your behavior but also make you more aware of the opportunities where you can grow and makes you go for them.
