9 Things to Consider Before Accepting Your Next Product Management Role
I often talk to potential product manager candidates for my team or PMs that I mentor who need help thinking about their next gig. In today’s hot job market — these people have choices, so often need to decide between multiple offers. One thing I always try to get to is the criteria they are using to select their next role. While this often ends up being an emotional gut decision, people usually do try to have some objective criteria.
I’ve started getting curious about how people weigh these criteria even if the weights are implicit.
Here is what I have heard in terms of the criteria that people use to decide on their next job, or to chose between options (in no particular order):
- Mission and vision of the new company or product: Do I believe in the mission of the company or product (why does the product exist?) and whether this aligns with my personal values? Am I inspired by the vision and where the company or product is going?
- Compensation and benefits: self-explanatory
- Growth opportunities: Is there a clear line of sight to increasing responsibilities, impact and possibly career growth in terms of promotions etc.?
- Learning opportunities: Will this role will allow me to learn a new (in-demand) skill?
- Title: Is the title of the role is commensurate with my experience and expectations, and confers social capital?
- Manager: What is my managers’ reputation? Is he/she someone I can see myself getting along with, learning from, being inspired by?
- Team culture: Can I see myself fitting into the culture of the team. As a side-note: to me team culture is not just about fun events but also defined by things like how the team is structured (e.g. flat vs. layered), how the talent system works (in terms of performance management, career paths etc.), how the team works (planning etc.), how the team interacts with others etc. (this is the framework from Primed to Perform, by Neel Doshi)
- Lifestyle factors (commute, work-life balance etc.): I’ve met a bunch of people that are changing jobs for a better commute, or deciding between like roles based on these kinds of lifestyle factors
- Visibility to senior leadership: Is the domain or product something that matters to leadership, and how much visibility the individual will get in that role?
Some people have even mentioned developing a spreadsheet with these various factors and rating opportunities on these factors. That made me thirst to quantify how people weigh these various factors.
So , I’ve developed a survey that attempts to get this quantification. If this topic is interesting to you — then please fill out this survey, and I will publish results on this space as soon as I get a meaningful sample.
All views, opinions and statements are my own
