What Are You Looking For In Your Next Role?
🧭 How ranking these criteria will help you navigate your next move and enable you to achieve your career goals.
Let’s face it, the era of “lifers” is over. In fact, it’s both accepted and expected that an individual will jump from one job to another multiples times in their career.
So with that in mind, it’s important to consider the underlying “why” of these moves — specifically, why are you leaving your existing company? or why are you planning to accept an offer elsewhere? — in order to take control of your journey, optimize towards your career ambitions, and avoid cruise control.
Another reason is that I’ve seen people blindly accept roles in order to run away from their existing one. The problem here is that when you’re blinded by desperation to escape, you forget to be intentional and run the risk of repeating history: you will find yourself in the same situation… again seeking a hasty exit.
So, my objective for this article is to summarize learnings from a recent decision of my own while helping you become more intentional about your next career move.
Understanding the importance of being intentional isn’t the hard part — the hard part is actually deciding with intention.
And, this is where you can start: Reflect on how much each of these criteria matter to you and use that to rank them. I’ll walk through each in more detail with some guided questions to help you rate them against each other.
- Experience
- Compensation
- Upward Mobility
- Company Prestige
- People
- Work Life Balance
- Purpose
💼 Experience
How important is gaining new or more experience to you? Specifically, how important is it to…
- Join a new field altogether (for e.g., jumping from marketing to product management)
- Stay in the same field, but gain technical experience in new specialities (e.g. ad tech, ml/ai, search, etc.)
- Stay in the same field and speciality, but experience how a new company tackles the problem differently
- Gain experience with a different type of company (e.g. startup, high growth, mature, consumer, b2b, internal)
- Gain experience as a people manager
💰 Compensation
Money isn’t everything and you may find yourself sacrificing compensation in order to optimize for upward mobility, title, or experience. So, how important is total compensation to you? And, if it comes down to it, how much are you willing to give up for other criteria?
Keep in mind that there are many components to compensation:
- Base salary
- Equity
- Bonus
- I also like to consider: 401K match, insurance, health/educational stipends, and perks
🚀 Upward Mobility
How important is a better or more senior title?
- Will accepting the new role mean you will get the title that you are looking for?
- Or if it’s a lateral move, is there room for upward mobility?
- Does the company have a good track record of promoting or hiring within?
🏅 Company Prestige
How important is a company’s prestige to you?
- Is joining a company with a recognizable name important?
- Are you looking to join a company whose name on your resume will immediately “boost” it?
👩🏻💼 People
You spend most of your years between college and retirement with your colleagues — with 40+ hour work weeks, this is unsurprising. So, how important are the people at your company to you?
Take into consideration:
- Specific people like your manager, direct reports, team mates, and leadership
- Diversity of people and availability of employee resource groups
- Values of the people at the company and how they align with your own
🚴 Work Life Balance
Maybe you’re at the point in your career where you are looking to start or spend more time with your family. Or perhaps you simply value your personal time. How important is work/life balance for you?
- What is the company’s work life balance culture like?
- What would your typical hours look like?
- Will you be expected to work after hours, on weekends, or on holidays?
- 💡 Tip: Keep the guided questions in mind as you’re going through the interview process.
🌎 Purpose
Do you define your purpose with what you do between your 9-to-5 or outside of that?
- How important is it to you that the company’s values or mission strongly align with your own?
- How important is it to you that your job or product(s) have a positive societal impact?
- Do you seek personal fulfillment from your job or from what you do after hours?
Thank you for taking the time to read and for being a part of my product manager growth journey.
Was this helpful? Did I miss any important criteria or questions? Or, do you have general thoughts, comments, opinions? Let me know what’s on your mind — after all, “feedback is the breakfast of champions”.
Check out my LinkTree to see what else I’ve been up to. 🚀
