Today, I’m making the strange and scary transition from being a product manager to the founder of my own startup.

Me and my co-founder were recently backed by Y Combinator, the legendary accelerator behind companies like Stripe, Airbnb and Coinbase. We’re pumped for this new journey.

Leaving a steady salary at a fast-growing company, especially with uncertain economic conditions, is objectively crazy.

But surprisingly, when I tell people about this transition I keep hearing things like

“I’m a little jealous of you.”

“I wish I could do that.”

“I feel stuck in my job.”

I wanted to unpack my decision and lay it out as objectively as I can. The goal is to give anyone thinking about the founder journey (or a big career transition) my thought process for making the leap.

What did you want to be when you were little?

If you asked me what I wanted to be when I was a teenager, I would’ve told you I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I fondly remember starting small businesses with friends, be it creating and selling comic books in elementary school or planning large scale events in high-school.

In university, I discovered a bunch of career paths that seemed like they would teach me useful skills. Consultant, UX Designer, Product Manager — each one seemed like great ways to learn what I needed to know to be successful.

Ultimately, I was lucky to join Facebook (now Meta) as a product manager after university. I learned a ton from this experience and am eternally grateful for everyone who I met.

But like in any job, I stepped into a well-crafted career ladder that tells you what you need to do to get to the next level of your career. It gave me a great hill to climb, along with people further up the hill to look up to.

Soon, however, my personal goals and the career ladder started to blur together.

I wasn’t thinking about learning skills to be an entrepreneur, I was goaling on skills that would help me move to the next rung of the product management ladder

Climbing the wrong hill

Chris Dixon, the legendary venture capitalist, has a great essay called Climbing the Wrong Hill. In it, he highlights a trap that many ambitious people fall into:

There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one. [They end] up falling for a common trap highlighted by behavioral economists: people tend to systematically overvalue near term over long term rewards.  This effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people. Their ambition seems to make it hard for them to forgo the nearby upward step.

People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.

In other words, the pressure to keep moving up may lead you to a spot you didn’t intentionally choose.

I took this advice to heart and introduced significant randomness into my life by joining a startup after 2.5 years at Facebook.

It was great — I got to work more closely with business development functions, got to talk to customers directly and started to attend industry conferences to learn about bigger trends in fintech, crypto and financial crime. 

But at the end of the day, I was still on the same product management hill, I had a set list of tasks and skills to develop with levels that soon started to find their way into my personal goals.

That’s when it hit me - to become the entrepreneur I dreamt of being since childhood, I might need to take a step down to get on the right track.

What do you need to make the jump?

Some people are brave enough to make the jump with nothing figured out. Alas, I am not.

I decided that I would have two criteria for when it was the right time to take the plunge:

1. Deep understanding of a big problem

2. Great people to work with

For (1), I spent the last four years deep in fintech. From launching WhatsApp Payments in Brazil to helping Paxos reach 10M crypto wallets globally, I had gotten very familiar with the challenges that come with scaling fintech platforms.

P.S. If you’re working in fintech and want to see what we’re working on, get in touch here 👀

For (2), I was lucky to reconnect with an extremely talented, technical friends who was also ready to quit his job and dive into the unknown with me.

Having these two things crystallized gave me the confidence that I could be successful.

So what’s next?

I’m going to share unique insights, non-obvious lessons and war stories from the earliest days of company building through this newsletter.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, be sure to subscribe or share this with friends:

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I’m also headed to San Francisco for the summer! If you’re in the area and want to catch up, reach out.

Finally, I’ll be sharing more details on what I’m working on soon. So stay posted.

Thanks for reading,

- Will

Naval Ravikant, prolific investor and co-founder of Angelist, has a non-intuitive suggestion:

What does a business risk here mean for a product manager?

To me, it’s working on a risky company-critical initiative — one where success can reinvent the business and where failure can be a huge setback.

Think of working on Disney+ before it launched or delivering the upcoming Augmented Reality (AR) glasses from Apple.

If you can successfully deliver on a company-critical initiative, you’ll be rewarded. Specifically, 

1. You’ll be trusted to lead larger teams

2. You’ll become more senior in the organization and

3. You’ll earn the trust and respect of the broader team, increasing your influence internally

These items all increase your leverage. This is the “fuel” to your career growth and what allows you to have an outsized impact on any environment you work in.

Below I want to share a recipe for growing your leverage internally through company-critical initiatives. It includes:

1. Embrace Accountability

2. Meta-Execute to Deliver

3. Earn Leverage (and my story of doing this myself)

Before that, a quick shoutout for today’s partner…

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🔭 Seek Accountability

Accountability for a company-critical initiative bears the risk of a highly-visible failure. That’s scary! 

But just as your failure is amplified, your success is too. People will notice if you can lead a challenging initiative and deliver what you’re accountable for.

In the end, taking calculated bets on yourself is how you grow faster than your peers.

So before finding accountability, ask yourself: are you ready to add fuel to your career fire? Things to consider are:

1. Can I handle my current scope well?

2. Does my manager trust me?

3. Is the new initiative clearly more important than my current one?

If you say yes to all three, let your manager or skip-level know that you have the capacity should a critical initiative come up. You may say:

Alternatively, seek out underfunded but critical initiatives yourself;

By putting your hand up to work on critical scope, you’re showing you care about the overall success of the company.

Meta-Execute to Deliver

How can you deliver a company critical initiative while not dropping the ball on your current scope? The answer rests in a practice I learned at Facebook called meta-execution.

Meta-execution is executing through others. This is how product directors can steer a team of 200 people without writing tickets, doing experiment reviews or writing weekly updates.

The ability to empower leaders within your team to have more ownership is what separates execution for a PM on a 5-person eng team and a PM who drives a 40-person eng team.

Imagine a world where you need to balance your existing scope with a company-critical initiative. The best way to meta-execute would be to find a capable leader on your team and delegate meaningful parts of the execution to them. This person may be:

1. An engineer, engineering manager or tech lead

2. A designer, data scientist or UX researcher

3. A customer success lead, product ops associate or program manager

Here’s what that division may look like:

Tactically, meta-execution unlocks your capacity to drive additional scope. In this case, the company's critical initiative is more important so it’s critical to spend more time there.

With this setup, it’s up to you now to deliver on the critical initiative. There are no shortcuts or secret sauce to do this correctly — it’s just executing to the best of your capabilities.

Accountability Earns Leverage

Success in your new initiative can earn you leverage in the form of a larger team, more influence and a higher role within the organization. 

I experienced this firsthand while I was a growth product manager for Facebook’s Video team. As lockdowns spread in the spring of 2020, more people were watching videos on Facebook.

We saw a surge in organic traffic but realized the need to drastically improve parts of our first-time user experience (FTUX) to retain them. I put my hand up to lead this initiative and quickly aligned the broad team on a strategy, feature roadmap and execution plan.

As the surge slowed down and the dust settled, I looked back and noticed that I was successfully able to lead my existing scope (which was user activation) and the critical improvements to FTUX. 

This led to my leverage growing internally:

I took a calculated risk on my ability to execute and it paid off. Give taking great accountability a try and let me know how it goes!

Recap:

1. Seeking accountability is like adding fuel to your career fire — it amplifies successes and failures

2. Successfully delivering on a key initiative where you’re accountable requires meta-execution

3. If you can deliver on the initiative successfully, you’ll be rewarded with more leverage

4. Leverage is the key to growing your career at an unusually fast pace

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As we head into an economic downturn, founders are all thinking about the same thing: becoming default alive.

Default alive means that companies make it to (or maintain) profitability with the money they have left.

To do this, they can either raise more money (hard), grow revenue (very hard) or cut expenses (the easiest).

In practice, we’re seeing several real companies double down on core revenue drivers and reduce spending on offshoots.

This includes Uber (full memo):

Meeting the moment means making trade-offs. The hurdle rate for our investments has gotten higher, and that means that some initiatives that require substantial capital will be slowed.

And Facebook (full memo):

The short answer is that we’re not trying to build a lot of new tabs right now - we’re focused on making our core products better and more integrated

This seems like good advice for founders — but how should employees navigate the downturn?

I think the answer is analogous to default alive - it’s to become default essential.

Essential means you are 100% critical to the core business and/or the most important company bets. Non-essential means the business would continue to operate without you.

As an employee, you want to work on essential initiatives. Not only will these be the safest for job security, but they are also the most likely to receive additional funding and have the most growth opportunities.

Now how do you get to the essential initiatives?

Below, I’ll share an unintuitive strategy. There are three steps:

1. Audit your portfolio of work

2. Find essential scope

3. Globally optimize

Let’s dive in.

1/ Audit your portfolio of work 

It’s important to understand how you’re allocating your time. For product managers, it’s even more important to understand how you're allocating your team’s time.

A breakdown of your personal capacity plan may look like this:

For a team, it may be:

From here, identify what portion of the effort is going to essential initiatives versus non-essential initiatives.

Essential means that the initiative is 100% critical to the core business and/or the most important company bets. Non-essential means the business would continue to operate without this initiative.

This is hard — it’s tough to admit that part of your plate may be non-essential. But having this view will help ensure your team becomes default essential to the company.

This is what it may look like:

If 100% of your and your team’s plate is essential then congrats, you are default essential to the company. If not, it’s time to find essential scope.

2/ Find essential scope

Your goal is to devote 100% of your personal and team capacity to essential initiatives. I’d suggest tackling this in two steps.

The first is to find essential initiatives at your company. My favourite way of doing this is to map your company’s investments on the BCG Matrix. It’s a simple 2x2 matrix that organizes bets in a portfolio by two axes:

1. The market growth rate

2. The share of the market that a company captures

Let’s use a company we all know to better explain this grid — Microsoft.

• ⭐️ Star: Microsoft Azure (high growth in cloud with high market share)

• 🐮 Cash Cow: Microsoft Office (lower growth rate but enormous market share)

• ❓Question Mark: Hololens (high growth rate but low market share)

• 🐶 Dog: Bing (low market share in a lower growth area)

You want to be on the Stars or the Cash Cows during hard times. Question marks can be important but there is a high risk. Avoid dogs at all costs.

The next step in finding essential initiatives is finding a way to work on Stars.

My suggestion is to speak to the product managers working on them. Chances are that they have important initiatives that are understaffed and in need of more support.

There may be an opportunity to support these — both with your team’s resources and your own capacity.

Reach out and have the conversations. Mention a desire to understand the gaps in the key areas. Here’s how I would do it:

Hey Jane. We’re planning for Q3 now and I’d love to understand the priorities for your areas. I’d also be interested to see if there is anything me or my team could help with.

After speaking with the relevant product leads, you may come away with a handful of essential, unfunded product areas.

Do a rough scoping of this work and create a second option for how you could better allocate your time and team’s resources. This may look like this:

If you can successfully do this, you’ve now created a roadmap that makes you and your team default essential.

3/ Globally optimize

It’s time to tell your manager and/or leadership team about your options. You may be thinking:

Wait so you want me to tell my manager that part of my work is non-essential and then dedicate my team’s resources to someone else’s scope? That’s crazy.

Yeah, this plan makes no sense if you’re playing political games. These include growing headcount for no reason or posturing about the importance of your work.

But this is what leaders who truly care about the success of a business should do. This is how your CEO is thinking and aligning yourself with that mentality shows strong character and long-term instincts.

So proactively share the options you’ve uncovered with decision-makers. In doing this, be sure to include the following messages:

1. Your desire to optimize for the company’s outcomes versus being tied to your scope

2. The work you’ve done to identify crucial areas

3. Your recommended roadmap for the highest impact

Here’s how I would approach it:

Hey all. I want to make sure that my team is ruthlessly prioritizing the most critical initiatives at the company — especially given the macro need to focus on profitability.

This is why I began understanding what crucial parts of the business were underfunded and in need of greater support. I also audited my team’s roadmap and noticed that we would create more value if we changed our roadmap to support some of those areas.

I’ve outlined Option 1 and Options 2. I recommend we pursue 2. What do you think?

This will require some discussion and alignment. But if you can successfully land this roadmap with the relevant stakeholders, your entire team will now be focused on the most important areas at the company.

In other words, you’ll all be default essential.

Closing Thoughts

As founders think about being default alive, strong employees should think about becoming default essential. Not only will this make your and your team job’s safer, but it will also demonstrate that you are a committed leader with a strong strategic sense.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this strategy below.

🚨 Featured job opportunities

🩺 WellTheory: Senior Product Manager (California)

• Will’s comment: Talk about mission-driven — WellTheory is looking for a 0-1 PM leader to reverse the autoimmune epidemic. If this cause speaks to you, check out the role.

💸 Paxos: Product Manager - Securities Settlement (New York City, San Francisco)

• Will’s comment: I work at Paxos! This is a high-priority role on an exciting team. Paxos' product culture is strong and a perfect fit for experienced PMs who want to drive impact in the blockchain/web3.

Want to feature a job? Post them here on our community job board.

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Managing up is the art of creating a strong relationship with your manager.

This is an underrated system for growth as a product manager.

Investing in this relationship is an excellent use of time as it unlocks:

1. A career coach and mentor: your manager has likely been in your shoes and can help you plan long-term in your career.

2. Connect to opportunities: your manager often has better visibility into the workings of the organization. If they trust you, they will nominate you to take on important projects or to step up and lead larger teams.

3. A life-long evangelist: even outside of your current company, having a senior person in your field who trusts and respects you will create long-term opportunities.

4. More enjoyable work environment: being a PM can be lonely. A manager can be your trusted confidant and sounding board if you invest time into the relationship.

The foundation of managing up is your regular one-on-one with your manager. I want to share the template I use for running these meetings with my manager.

This template was simplified and refined over 3 years and 6 managers. It helps me:

1. Be more effective in my role

2. Carve out time to discuss my career growth

3. Bring visibility to work I’m doing

Give it a try:

Get my template

Let’s break down the components.

10 minutes of updates

In a 30-minute meeting, I like to spend ~10 minutes walking my manager through the items I’m working on. There are a few reasons to do this:

1. Get light feedback on items that I have a good handle on

2. Bring visibility to the work you’re doing and make it top of mind

3. Raise blockers to help your team move forward

I’ve included some example agenda topics in the template:

Kicked off Project ABC working with squad 1 and squad 2. This maps to my annual OKR 2 and if we can execute, should unlock N new users.

Aligned with Kate on the priority on work-stream A. She will prioritize this in the next three sprints.

Kicked off OKR planning for next quarter. I’m concerned that OKR 1 is not achievable given the current resources.

• What’s the best forum to raise this concern in?

20 minutes of discussion

The more nuanced part of my agenda is the ~20 minutes of discussion topics. These are topics to dive into with your manager.

There are three types of discussion topics:

1/ Advice

Your manager has likely been in your shoes. If you’re struggling with an element of the role, team dynamics or navigating the company, seek your manager’s feedback.

It’s essential to frame your feedback ask in a way that will create the most useful outcomes. So rather than asking:

Do you have advice on topic X?

I like to frame it as:

Do you have advice for solving Problem Z? In Situation Y, I’m noticing that Problem Z keeps occurring. I’ve tried to debug this by doing Action A but it hasn’t solved the problem.

This framing shows that you understand the core problem and have proactively taken actions to try and solve it. If you haven’t yet tried to solve it yourself, do that before seeking advice.

Examples of advice topics:

My relationship with the customer success team isn’t as strong as I’d like. I feel like this is because I have to constantly turn down their suggestions on what to build and when.

• How can I say no without harming relationships? So far, I’ve tried to explain our resource constraints and other priorities, but neither seems to be landing.

2/ Career planning

One-on-ones with your manager can often be very tactical. It’s important to make time with your manager to discuss your long-term career path.

For you, this is extremely valuable. It allows you to zoom out from OKRs and annual goals to reflect on the skills you want to accumulate, the experiences you want to have and the relationships you want to build.

For your manager, it helps them understand what you want and what it will take to keep you motivated in your role.

Great managers will use this information to connect you with opportunities to grow your career. Selfishly, this helps them retain good PMs and gives you a chance to have more impact in your role.

Examples of career planning topics:

One of my career goals is to become a manager by the end of the year. I spoke with two people managers this week (Jack and Melanie) to get their feedback on the right managerial skills to build and how to build them.

• Based on these conversations, here is my plan [link] to learn these skills in the next 6 months.

  • Are there items missing?

  • Do you have other suggestions for how I might learn these skills?

3/ Strategy

Finally, one-on-ones are a great place to review strategic directions for your product area.

I often do this by reviewing a doc with them. In addition to soliciting feedback, this is an excellent way to build alignment and create an evangelist for your strategy.

Examples of strategy topics:

I think we need to more aggressively target Customer Segment Z. There is a $10B opportunity if we can capture 10% of this market in the next 4 years.

1. Are you aligned with this framework for evaluating the investment decision? 

2. Who else should I run this decision by?

Putting this into practice

With a template in hand, make sure to do the following three things to deploy it correctly:

1. Share the doc with your manager so they have visibility on upcoming and past conversations

2. Add your topics at least 24 hours before your one-on-one. This makes sure that A) your manager has time to read it if they like, B) it’s ready for your one-on-one

   1. Bonus: send your manager a message with the agenda and ask them to drop any comments or add any topics they’d like to the agenda

   2. If there are no topics, cancel the meeting to save time

3. Stick to the agenda and capture notes live.

In summary, use your one-on-ones with your manager to build a strong relationship.

You can do this by creating visibility on your work, seeking their input and discussing your long-term career objectives.

Community Advice on Managing Up

I asked Twitter what advice they have on managing up. There was some great advice:

From Adam, Director of Product at Microsoft:

From Graham, Product Partner at Connect Ventures:

🚨 Featured job opportunities

🤝 Paxos: Product Manager - Brokerage Transfers(New York City, US Remote)

🏄 Fractal Founders: Founder (New York City, San Francisco)

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Until next time,

Will

When I was in university, I wanted to land a role in User Experience design. But I didn’t know anyone who was hiring.

I caught up with a few friends during the summer and told them about all of the weekend design projects I was working on.

I showed them my portfolio and told them I was looking for an internship in the space.

One of them was impressed. She appreciated that I was self-taught and already had a portfolio of projects.

Later that summer, she told me that her company was hiring UX design interns and she’d be willing to refer me.

That company was Microsoft and it was a pivotal role for my career.

Looking back many years later, how did I really land that role?

The answer is that I accidentally created an evangelist.

An evangelist is someone who respects you, knows your aspirations and thinks of you when a relevant opportunity crosses their desk. 

I’ve since learned that evangelists are the most important relationships to foster in your career. Evangelists can help you:

1. Get your next promotion

2. Secure funding, sales, partnerships or talent for your startup

3. Connect with pivotal job opportunities

4. Find mentorship from experts in your field

Creating Evangelists

We’ve all naturally created evangelists in our careers. But I’ve started to notice that there’s a process for creating evangelists more intentionally. Here it is:

1. Build credibility

Aim to build credibility with someone by delivering exceptional impact and demonstrating strong character through repeated interactions.

Exceptional impact means that you are delivering strong results in your core role and delivering business impact outside of your role.

As a product manager, this involves executing well and growing your scope (a topic I’ve dived into here and here).

These results need to be paired with strong character. This means that people think of you as ethical, reliable and trustworthy.

There aren’t shortcuts to demonstrating character, but one mantra to keep in mind is “Show, Don’t Tell”.

You can’t tell people that you are reliable, you need to show them they can count on you over time.

In brief, building credibility is about delivering exceptional results while proving that you have a strong moral character. It’s not easy, but its worth it.

If you feel like you’ve done that, it’s time for the next step.

2. Share your goals

For people to evangelize you, they need to know your goals. Otherwise, you won’t be top of mind when relevant opportunities come up. 

Communicating your aspirations can be hard.

Here are some templates for how to share your goals with those that you’ve established credibility with:

Manager

My goal is to become the manager for this division. I’ve started to take on more managerial responsibilities recently, but I know I have a lot to learn. Can we work together to find what experiences I should aim to develop over the next 6-12 months to set myself up for this role?

Peers

Just an FYI, but I’ve been doing some design consulting on the side. If you know any early stage companies that want to contract a UX designer, send them my portfolio!

3. Evangelize Others

Life is a repeated game. Helping someone today can open doors for you tomorrow.

So evangelize your friends, peers and even superiors. Understand their career goals and find ways to connect them to opportunities that matter to them.

While it’s easy to evangelize friends and peers, evangelizing your superiors is less intuitive. Here are three ways it can be done:

1. Nominate them for opportunities like a speaking gig or an award.

2. Promote their work by celebrating their accomplishments or giving their managers positive feedback about them.

3. Help them hire by introducing or referring people in your network to join their team. This is a big vote of confidence and they will appreciate the endorsement!

Summary

Creating evangelist is a skillset that will accelerate your career.

It also forces you to build credibility, be transparent about your goals and help others along the way.

As a next step, think of 1-2 people that would make for great evangelists.

Find ways to build credibility with them and form a strong relationship. From there, share with them your career goals and find opportunities to evangelize them.

Let me know how it goes!

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It’s invite-only, curated by me and tailored for PMs with 2+ years of experience. Just create a profile and let jobs come to you.

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Until next time,

Will

Twice in the last month, a coworker did something that irked me. 

More specifically, I didn’t appreciate them communicating on behalf of me or my team to a wider audience.

Maybe it’s being Canadian or people-pleaser tendencies, but I’m pretty conflict averse.

When something small irks me, I usually simmer in isolation before sweeping it under the rug.

But Paxos, my new startup, has a cultural norm of real-time candor. This means that to show real respect to our colleagues, we share candid, real-time feedback. This helps them and the overall team improve. 

This norm is really well-realized in our day-to-day operations.  In one-on-one conversations or Slack messages, people will often tell me things that I can improve or suggestions for how to I can better lead my team. 

At first, I was defensive hearing these suggestions and took them as criticism.

But after the initial sting, implementing the feedback really did help me improve. I found myself being more effective in meetings, documenting next steps better and creating more precise goals.

So in these two situations where I was irked, I decided I wouldn’t just simmer. Instead, I exercised the value of real-time candor and sent both of the individuals a message like the following:

“Quick feedback - in the future can we make sure you and I are aligned before sharing docs like X? This makes sure we have the details sorted out before moving to next steps.” 

To my pleasant surprise, both times the feedback was received extremely well. They were both apologetic about my concern and receptive to incorporating the feedback. 

Better yet I found that our working relationships improved dramatically. We were now both more candid with each other and we spoke more frequently.

As a newcomer to the team, it also felt like I had earned the respect of these coworkers because I had done the “hard thing” of giving feedback rather than the cop-out of bottling it up.

Next time you find yourself irked, try giving real-time feedback. It can diffuse tension, help your team improve and build stronger relationships with coworkers.

Need some help doing this? Here are three templates for fast feedback:

A direct ask:

Hey Sam. Can you share an agenda ahead of our team syncs? I feel like we can use the team’s time more effectively if we have prepared topics ahead of our conversation.

A suggestion for improvement:

Hey Priya. Good job on the Q2 OKR presentation. Next time, I’d suggest skipping the background context and jumping straight to our OKRs. This will give us more time for discussion with leads.

Constructive criticism:

Hey Alex. I think your comment about John’s performance in the general Slack channel was inappropriate. It may have hurt their feelings and is not the culture we want to create. I’d suggest reaching out to John to apologize.

Give it a go and let me know how it lands!

Small personal update:

For 40+ weeks in 2021, I sent out a weekly essay on product management. But life got a little crazy in the fall: I left Facebook, joined Paxos and have been trying to enjoy my life in London.

But I’m going to start publishing regularly again! I’ll aim for bi-weekly to start. Thanks, everyone for your patience and kind words during a busy period in my life.

Oh, and I also have a cool project to share with you all soon based on this newsletter’s mission: Expand Access to Opportunity. Stay tuned (or reach out if you’re really curious).

Hope life is treating you well,

Will

What differentiates junior and senior product managers? While this varies at each company, there seem to be two universal skillsets:

1. Meta-Execution: the ability to empower capable leaders on your team to drive meaningful parts of execution. Doing this helps your team grow, create more aggregate impact and free up your capacity to focus on strategy.

1. Create scope: proactively identify and capture opportunities outside of your current areas of responsibility. These allow you to create impactful work for your product team while helping you grow your own career.

In a past essay, I explain what scope is and why great PMs should want to create scope. Today, I want to talk about how to identify and capture opportunities to grow your scope.

🔦 Identifying Pivotal Scope

Scope is the area you are responsible for as a product manager. Let me explain with an example.

Six months into my product management journey, I became a PM on the Growth team for  Watch, the video destination within the Facebook app. I was the most junior PM on the team.

The growth team (at the time) consisted of three “pods” - activation (acquiring new users), retention and international markets (products for specific markets). Each of these had its own product team and was led by a PM.

From this example, you can see that scope is directly tied to:

1. How senior you are as a product manager

2. The resources (ex. team size, budget) you have at your disposal

3. Because of the two things above, scope is also tied to how much impact you can create for the product

All of these are good things to have and a PM who is looking to grow should seek to grow their scope.

The million-dollar question becomes: how can I create more scope?

I’ve thought about this a lot and I think there are three ways to grow your scope:

🌁 Extension

Key question: what’s an area adjacent to your current scope that can drive meaningful impact?

Often, there are areas that your current scope may interact with that you are not investing in. For example, when I was working on WhatsApp Payments in Brazil, there was an opportunity to build out a more unified approach to payment compliance across all of the countries we were operating in.

Noticing these extensions requires understanding your product space well and seeing where you can add value. If you ever find yourself saying, “That’s out of scope” seek to understand if this is an area you can really invest in.

⏰ Moments in Time

Key question: how has the world changed and what can we do about it?

When major shifts happen, opportunities arise. These shifts may be in the form of

• New laws/policies that affect your product area

• Strategy shifts within your company

• Strategy shifts of your competitor

• World-changing events like COVID-19 or new technology research

If you notice that one of these shifts will affect your product, find ways to capture this scope (discussed in a moment).

⛓ Connecting Dots

Key question: how can we join forces with other teams to create more value together?

Socializing with other PMs inside and outside of your company is great for your personal development - but it also may help you find new scope.

When working on a video growth team, I had a chat with the product manager that led the “Saved” product (where you can save links, videos, posts and come back to them later). In chatting, we learned that there were some interesting experiments we could run that would let us both grow our top-line metrics.

Make time in your busy schedule to speak with other product managers across the organization. Counterintuitively, this may be a great way to help your current product area.

🧲 Capturing Scope

Finding scope is great. But turning it into “shovel-ready” work for your team is another ball game.

Regardless of how you find the scope, the next steps are usually the same: create a strategy for addressing this new area.

This involves:

• Context and why now: share your latest understanding of the landscape and why now is the best time to invest.

• Opportunity size: measure the impact of this new area against other investment opportunities by measuring the opportunity size against the top-line metric or OKR.

• Plan of attack: how will you make progress in this new space? This may be a prioritized backlog of the features you may need to build, an understand roadmap to help you uncover more information etc.

• Defining success: If all goes well with your plan of attack, what will we have accomplished? This may be a movement of a metric or a new understanding.

• Resources: what new investments will we need to achieve success? This can be a headcount ask for more engineers, regular check-ins with executives or the ability to let other goals for your team slip in order to pursue this new initiative.

Here are two templates that may help you define your strategy:

1. Initiative doc by Lenny Rachitsky

2. Roadmap 1-pager by a Facebook PM

📝 Summary

The path to growing from a product manager into a product leader involves meta-execution and creating scope.

• Scope is your area of responsibility. Find ways to grow this to grow your career and the impact your team can have.

• When finding new areas of scope, look for extensions to your current scope, moments in time and opportunities to connect dots.

• Once you’ve identified a worthwhile area, proactively create a strategy that helps you capture it.

📚 Reads and Resources

When to Make a Career Change by Sharmeen: Sharmeen decided to leave Twitch to join Facebook. This was a big move and she shares her thought process throughout.

Community DAOs by Patrick Rivera: DAOs are one of the most fascinating developments in crypto. Patrick does a great primer and shares how they can be used to build mores sustainable business models.

What needs to change? by Nikhyl Singhal: Nikhyl is a Facebook VP who shares case studies on when he needed to adapt to major changes. A great read for product managers.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

One fascinating concept I've learned as a product manager is the idea of creating scope.

In other roles, “scope” is a fixed list of responsibilities. But for product managers, scope tends to be extremely fluid. While you start with a set of responsibilities, these often change with business needs.

The best PMs seem to always tackle exciting areas of work and grow their role in the company. But their role isn't growing because they are given more scope — it's growing because they are creating more scope.

Generally, I've noticed what differentiates junior and senior PMs is the ability to find and drive new scope. This ability require proactivity, awareness and confidence in your own abilities.

Today, I want to share my learnings around scope and how you can create more of it. Doing this will let you:

1. Learn new skills by tackling interesting areas

2. Become invaluable to your company

3. Accelerate your own PM career.

🎨 Visualizing Scope

Six months into my product management journey, I became a PM on the Growth team for Watch, the video destination within the Facebook app. I was the most junior PM on the team.

The growth team (at the time) consisted of three "pods" - activation (acquiring new users), retention and international markets (products for specific markets). Each of these had its own product team and was led by a PM.

It’s important to note that PMs who report to the same manager can vary in seniority. What doesn’t vary is that seniority is directly tied to the size, ambiguity and impact of the scope they oversee.

This is also true for the Group PM. They are the most senior and have the largest scope of all PMs in a group.

But growth was only one group of Watch. Other groups focused on other parts of the product, for example, social features, the viewing experience, and the back-end platform. Zooming out, Watch as a whole looked something like this.

From this view, you'll notice that the Group PM of growth fits into a nearly identical organizational structure as individual PMs within the growth team. They are just a part of a larger area — in this case, all of Watch.

In both the Group PM and individual PM cases, PMs with larger scope have the ability to have more impact. This is because important areas garner more resources (ex. # of engineers), attention from leadership and are typically more aligned with the larger group strategy.

In summary, scope has two key traits:

1. Senior PMs have a larger scope (and therefore, higher likelihood for impact)

2. You can grow your scope in two ways: by managing other PMs or creating new scope within your area.

Managing other PMs is intuitive and a common career goal of product managers. I want to speak more to the second route of expanding your scope, which is much more nuanced.

🔍 Creating scope

In the middle of my time on the Watch Growth team, the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns started to sweep the world. With people stuck at home, more people were spending time on Facebook and enjoying videos.

We saw a surge in activation, which is the area I was responsible for at the time. But as the surge was ongoing, we realized the need to drastically improve our first-time user experience (FTUX) to make sure those new users came back.

I decided to lead this sprint as it was a natural extension of my scope. It involved creating a new strategy, aligning quickly with our leadership, and executing a series of brand-new features.

As the surge slowed down and we went back to business as usual, the "Activation" pod began to include the FTUX as an essential part of our team’s charter. We were planning projects for the next few quarters to continue to improve this area with new engineers. Our scope had grown because it now encompassed a larger area.

This story shows how scope creation happens in practice. Often, an event (internal or external) will make a new opportunity possible. It’s then up to the product manager to proactively understand an area and create a path forward. Capturing the opportunity and the ability to expand your scope requires four things:

1. A strong handle on your current scope. If you're overwhelmed by your current responsibilities, you won't be in a good position to scale your team.

2. Awareness of trends outside of your immediate scope. Follow industry news, tune into company All-Hands, socialize with other people across the company and speak to directors/VPs and understand the areas they are thinking about. This product discovery will help you find opportunities.

3. The ability to prioritize. There may be a reason no one else is tackling the area. Prioritize the opportunities that you think have the most value. I wrote a full guide on prioritization here.

4. An ability to proactively define a new plan: This may be in the form of a roadmap, a product brief, a strategy or a vision. But the key part here is that you need to find and create a path forward in an area to own the scope truly. Otherwise, you risk taking responsibility for an area and having no progress to show for it.

If you’re looking to grow, aim to improve on the four attributes above. Take time to research outside of your immediate area to identify worthwhile opportunities to tackle. I’ve been inspired by rockstar PMs that have done this themselves and am confident that it’s a clear path to growing your responsibilities and impact.

✍️Summary

Growing your scope is the surest way to accelerate your career, learn new skills, and have more impact.

1. Seniority is directly tied to the size, ambiguity and impact of the scope you oversee.

2. Find worthwhile scope by keeping a pulse on trends in adjacent product areas and factoring in product discovery into your weekly schedule.

3. Proactively define a way of capturing the identified opportunity. If you need more resources (ex. a bigger team) to capture it, make the proposal.

4. Delivering on your existing and new scope will allow you to grow your skills and responsibilities sustainably.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

How to Work Hard by Paul Graham: a great essay on how to pair focus with raw effort to achieve things you previously thought were impossible.

Instagram’s Evolution by Ben Thompson: a thought-provoking take on Instagram’s new focusses on creators, video, shopping and messaging.

How People Discover New Products by Lenny Rachitsky: Lenny highlights the seven ways people can hear about products with examples and tips on how to execute that growth strategy.

If you liked this edition of Product Life, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with a friend. 😊

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Until next time,

Will

Summary: Say the most important thing first. Not at the end. Not after setting context. This applies to product briefs, leadership reviews, articles, resumes and presentations. You can identify the most important pieces by asking two questions: What Am I Really Trying to Say and Why Should I Care?

I shared a Twitter thread (a series of connected tweets) based on last week’s article. I opened with context and a picture of Obama. What’s not to like?

The most valuable piece of the thread was the template I included in the fourth tweet. But a week later, I noticed that only 3% of people who saw the thread got to the most valuable part.

What went wrong?

Answer: I had buried the lead. This was a mistake that I, and maybe some of you, have made in the past.

A lead is the most important and eye-catching idea of a story. The lead sets the foundation for the narrative and entices readers to keep reading.

Burying a lead is putting this important idea deep into the story. Surfacing the lead, on the other hand, is opening with the most important idea. Each successive paragraph then fleshes out the main idea for those interested in getting deeper into the concept. 

There are a few benefits of surfacing with the lead:

1. Hooks readers: you’re more likely to keep reading if the opening lines are insightful and eye-catching.

2. It makes the content skimmable: someone can read just the introduction and understand the content and key takeaways.

3. Creates more aggregate value: the lead is often the most useful thing in a story. By surfacing it, more people will be exposed to the lead. This maximises the value created by your content.

I wanted to try a new thread on Twitter — but this time, I opened with the lead (the template). Impressions of the template itself increased by 10x!

🔍 Finding the Lead

Identifying the lead in your story is easier said than done.

One framework that I find especially helpful in identifying the lead is asking myself two questions: 

• “What Am I Really Trying to Say? (WAIRTS): Take a step back and try to answer this question. Pretend you’re telling a friend what you’re trying to explain over beer or coffee. Use simple language and jot down the points you mention.

• Why Should I Care? (WSIC): Pair WAIRTS with reasons why your reader should care. This may be direct outcomes of the lead.

I try to answer these for every article. Here are a real WAIRTS and WSIC I wrote for the article The Best Way to Build Credibility 🤝

• WAIRTS: Replace vague statements with actions and results

• WSIC: This makes your writing clearer. It also makes it specific to you, builds credibility and uncovers useful information.

🌟 Not Just For Writing

Here’s a fun fact: nearly every internal doc at Facebook begins with a tl;dr (too long; didn’t read). Surfacing the lead has become a part of the culture. Likewise, I see it often and wanted to share a few examples where I’ve seen value in surfacing the lead.

Leadership Reviews

When reviewing a plan with leadership, the lead is often a question you need to be answered. Next time you’re reviewing a plan, try pulling the key questions to the top of the document or presentation to facilitate a better conversation. For example:

Title: [Leadership Reveiw] Business Case for launching product X in South Africa

Key Questions:

• Are we aligned on a budget of $500M for 2021?

• Should we invest more in go-to-market partnerships?

Product Briefs

Product briefs outline the key details of a product. They are often viewed by many people with little context on your team’s work area.

This is why I start all product briefs with an accessible tl;dr statement. It includes details like the user problem, the proposed solution, goals and a high level strategy. For example:

Title: [Team XYZ] Feature X Product Brief

tl;dr:

• New users find the home screen overwhelming, causing them to not buy their first stock.

• We propose adding a new user onboarding expreince.

• We’ll build it by starting with Milestone 1 followed by Milestone 2 in Q1 2022.

Resumes, LinkedIn and Self-Reviews

The most common way to frame your experiences is to use the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result). A consulting friend shared a format I thought was even better: RCAR (results, context, action results). 

In this context, results are the lead that you want the reader to remember. Bring it to the front and close out the bullet point with another result

STAR

• Create marketing materials and publicize events through social media. Saw increased attendance at several club programs throughout the year

RCAR

• Boosted attendance by 36% for a series of marketing events in 2020; designed new marketing materials that contributed to $1,000 incremental ticket revenue

📝 Summary

Share the most important point(s) first. Add more details with each paragraph that comes after.

• Surfacing the lead can hook readers, make content more skimmable and create more aggregate value.

• Ask yourself What Am I Really Trying to Say and Why Should I Care to help identify the salient points.

• This isn’t just for writing; try using it on your next leadership review, product brief doc or self-review.

Internet Things I’m Enjoying

🗺 From Listening Tour to State of the Union by Deb Liu: Deb’s playbook for onboarding helped me ramp up and start adding value early on. Check out her amazing State of the Union template!

🖼 The Part Time Creator Manifesto by Shawn Wang: A definition (and celebration) of part-time creators. For someone who loves my job and creating, I really resonated with it.

🏳️‍🌈 Earning the Six Stripes on my Rainbow by Arinze Obiezue: A heartbreaking but triumphant story of accepting of the skin and world you’re born into.

Thanks for reading! If you like what you read, subscribe for weekly insights on product management, careers and personal growth:

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See you next week,

Will

I joined a new team three weeks ago. As I ramp up, I keep notes — documents, conversation notes, and thoughts that I’m having (ex. “Why are we building feature X?”).

These notes are obviously helpful to me. But, deployed properly, they can also be useful to your team too.

This concept dawned on me while reading an article by Deb Liu (former VP of Product at Facebook, current CEO of Ancestry). When she started her new role, she insisted on beginning with a “listening tour.” Here’s why:

Leaders are not hired to have all of the answers, rather they are sought out because they can facilitate the company finding the answers together. At the end of the thirty days, I plan to share a state of the union assessment with insights from these conversations and how it will guide us going forward.

A “state of the union” creates a shared ground truth that the team can use to find a path forward. It also helps you clarify your understanding of the space and spark healthy conversation about the team's state.

I wrote an early state of the union after my first week. Here’s a look at the outcome (anonymized, with an index on the side):

Below, I’ll share how I created this in my first week and some of the value it provides my team (and me).

🧠 Accumulate Context

I find one-on-one meetings to be the most important source of context. The perspectives of key members of the organization can give you a more nuanced understanding of the space.

I follow a playbook by “Boz”, the VP of Facebook Reality Labs, for initial one-on-ones. He has an approach he calls the “Cold Start Algorithm.”  This helps to make sure these one-on-ones give you the most context possible. Here's how it works:

• For the first 25 minutes: ask them to tell you everything they think you should know. Take copious notes. Only stop them to ask about things you don’t understand. Always stop them to ask about things you don’t understand.

• For the next 3 minutes: ask about the biggest challenges the team has right now.

• In the final 2 minutes: ask who else you should talk to. Write down every name they give you.

Repeat the above process for every name you’re given. Don’t stop until there are no new names.

The first 25 minutes give you opinionated context. This is valuable when you’re learning about a space. Differences in opinions also create opportunities for you to drive clarity and better communication.

The next 3 minutes give you a list of problems you may need to tackle. But don’t be afraid to let some fires burn.

The last part is the most important. This will help you understand the “central nodes” on your team. These are the people with influence, knowledge and respect of the team.

Use the Cold-Start Algorithm to create a first impression of the team that is fresh and nuanced. 

🖼 Paint the Picture

Now that you’ve collected these perspectives, unify them into an early point of view (POV). 

Sharing this perspective has three benefits:

1. Refine and clarify your understanding: use your manager and other team leads as a soundboard for your POV. Take their feedback and make sure you’re on the same page.

2. Create shared truth for the next step: By driving clarity on the current situation, you’re setting the foundation for future strategy. If the team has the same understanding, discussions about the future will be more fruitful.

3. Build credibility with your team: Show that you’re actively thinking about strategy and context early on.

Here’s an anonymized version of my State of the Union. Use this as a starting point for creating shared understanding on your team.

Some notes:

• Align your understanding with your manager first. The last thing you want to do is give mixed signals to the team.

• Be humble and incorporate feedback into your POV. The goal isn’t for everyone to love your POV and take it as the truth. Its to create a shared truth with your team. Your SOTU is meant to be a conversation starter.

Summary

Create shared truth across your team. This helps to ground the work being done in the larger company strategy and facilitates conversations.

• Use the Cold-Start Algorithm to make the most of your first one-on-ones. Repeat the process until you have enough understanding for a POV

• Refine and edit notes into a cohesive narrative. This helps you and your team.

• Align with your manager on your POV. This can help build context and trust with your manager.

• Share with your team. This starts conversations and helps build shared understanding.

Internet Things I’m Enjoying:

✍️ Copywriting: The Definitive Guide: A comprehensive series on punchy writing.

☕️ Building a New Product on Founder’s Journal: How the founder of Morning Brew created a new product with few resources.

🎧 S8E1 - Kanye West YEEZUS on Dissect: One of my favourite podcasts is starting a new season analyzing the polarizing YEEZUS by Kanye. I’m so excited.

Tweet of the week

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Will

I'm so passionate about product management!

This is one of the most infuriating things to hear. 🤬

Anyone can say they are passionate about a topic. In fact, LinkedIn has “passionate” as one of their top 10 buzzwords, and CNBC has it as one of the phrases to delete off your resume. Saying you’re "passionate" has become meaningless.

But here's the thing: passionate people don't say they're passionate. Instead, they do something about it.

People who want to communicate their true passions follow a classic writing rule: show, don't tell. From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

Show, don't tell is a technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's exposition, summarization, and description.

In short: back up your claimed passion with actions or results. This will make your claim more credible. For example:

• Passionate about knitting? Have an Instagram Shop where you sell your designs.

• Passionate about financial inclusion? Volunteer at tax workshops for underrepresented groups.

• Passionate about product management? Build a product!

“Show, don’t tell” isn’t just for passion; across the board, this principle can make you more trustworthy, help you develop buy-in and allow you to communicate more effectively. Here’s how we can use this principle in common situations.

Show, Don’t Tell Examples

🤝 Networking

Telling: “I want to get into tech. Do you have any advice?”

Showing: “I have a podcast where I interview tech leaders and get their advice for college students entering the field. Would you like to be on it?”

Why this works: Provide value to the person you’re interested in. This creates a more mutually beneficial relationship while also demonstrating your skills/commitment to the field. Plus, you’ll get that advice in the end!

💼 Performance Reviews

Telling: “I deserve a promotion.”

Showing: “My ability to lead project X, improve topline growth by 20% and manage two junior PMs qualifies me for a promotion to level 3.”

Why this works: By anticipating the question (in this case, “why do you deserve a promotion?”), you can appear more confident, qualified and aware of the business realities.

💌 Cold Emails

Telling: "I'm passionate about tech and want to get into PM. Can we chat?"

Showing: "I’m working with 1 designer and 3 engineers on an app for music lovers to connect over their favourite artist. We launched on Product Hunt last week - check it out! This side project makes me think I’d enjoy a career in product management. Can we chat?"

Why this works: Showing that you’re building something demonstrates proof of work — the fact that you’ve put time, effort and thought into their passion before asking for help.

👩‍🏫 Presentations

Telling: “Our mission is to make checkout for micro-merchants seamless.”

Showing: “Last year, we increased checkout conversions by 35% for micro-merchants.”

Why this works: Focus on results, not desires. This guides the presentation to more actionable (rather than theoretical) conversations.

📝 Resumes

Telling: “Managed social media accounts for a brand with 30K followers.”

Showing: “Increased social media following by 10% (+3K followers) through a 6-week referral campaign.”

Why this works: This shows the impact of the work, which is always more important to a prospective employer.

Q: What if you have nothing to show?

Answer: Build something to “show”! If you’re “telling” without the experience, actions or results to back it up, then you risk being not taken seriously.

And if you’re new here, join thousands of product managers who are growing their career by subscribing below:

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Until next time,

Will

Have you ever had a job that was pivotal to your career? 

I have. It was my internship as a UX Designer at Microsoft. This role pushed me past my comfort levels, exposed me to the wonderful world of product development and taught me how to work with engineers. Leaving this internship, I felt like I had grown so much in a short period of time.

When I talk to others with similar experiences, I notice that these pivotal roles all share common qualities. I've been able to piece together these qualities together into a model to help people spot these career moves. I call it the Pivotal Growth Model This model has led me to some unintuitive lessons:

1. Never apply for a job you're qualified for

2. Room for growth is the main thing that matters.

3. The job description is a rubric, not a checklist.

4. The job description tells you the maximum you can learn in a role

Today, I want to share this model with you and walk through how I landed on these lessons.

Pivotal growth maximizes learning

Your early career is all about learning. As each year passes, you want to learn new skills that can help you tackle new problems related to your passions — or, better yet, your vision. Visualized, this may look like this: 

The best way to learn more is through experiences. These may be projects, internships, volunteering, extracurriculars or apprenticeships.  Each experience can help you learn skills in a set period of time. 

A job is a type of experience that can help you learn. A job has a few qualities that make it distinct from other experiences:

1. You need to meet the minimum skill level to get a job. For example, you may need experience with Photoshop to become a designer.  

2. While you do the job, you'll learn new skills. 

3. When you leave the job you'll be at a new skill level. This new level can qualify you for higher-skilled jobs in the future.

Not all jobs are created equal

Like I mentioned, some jobs have been pivotal for me while others have not. This is true for everyone: some jobs will teach you more than others. Let's build out the Pivotal Growth Model to help us visualize which jobs will teach you the most.

A job can differ in three dimensions: room for growth, duration and your qualification for the role.

The most important of these is room for growth. This determines how many new skills you're able to learn from a job. In most jobs, there's a finite amount of skills you are able to learn. If you were to visualize this, the "cap" on learning is meeting the maximum qualifications for a role.

If you've ever learned a new set of skills (ex. ballet, gaming), you'll know there’s a learning curve. It usually follows the same cycle; first, you learn the base patterns. Second, you practice. Third, you refine. This is the same curve in a job. I like to think of it as three distinct phases:

1. Learning Phase: when you enter a new environment, there is a lot to learn. Initially, it may be overwhelming but recognize that this is the period where you're learning the most.

2. Practicing Phase: when you've been at the job for a while, you may be more comfortable with your responsibilities. This is the period where you'll practice everything you've learned and do the job well.

3. Flattening Phase: after practicing skills sufficiently, your learning curve will start to flatten. This is evident with some boredom in the role or the feeling that you may not be learning anything new.

The stage you enter the role at depends on how qualified you are for the role. This implies a key point: your room for growth is directly linked to how qualified you are. Imagine the same job done by three people of different qualification levels:

Stringing a few roles together, this may be your skill development over two years:

Two takeaways:

1. The more qualified you are for a role, the less skill development you can expect.

2. There is a cap on how you can learn from a role. This "upper bound" is usually the maximum qualifications for a role.

Use the Job Description

From the outside, it can be tough to know how well you can do a job (your qualifications) and how much you stand to learn in the role (room for growth). Fortunately, we can use the job description to give us a proxy answer for each of these.

Job descriptions often have a qualification section. Many people, including a disproportionate number of underrepresented minorities, feel the need to meet all of these criteria to apply. 

This is a shame because companies are not looking for the perfect candidate. The qualifications section is not a checklist; it’s a "wishlist". You'll never meet 100% of the criteria — and if you are, you shouldn't apply for the job because there's no room to grow!  

These findings are backed by a study from Robert Half, a human resource consulting firm, which says:

• 84% of companies are willing to hire and train a candidate who lacks the required skills 

• 42% of applicants to a given job listing don’t meet skills requirements, but 62% of employees have been offered a position for which they were not qualified.

• In summary:  “Companies are challenged with finding qualified individuals who meet 100% of the job description, so they’re hiring individuals who meet a portion.”

Using the JD to determine qualifications and room for growth

Instead of a checklist, think of a job description as a rubric. They can help you identify how qualified you are for the role and how much room for growth there is.

Take all the "requirements" from the job description and assess what learning phase you’re at for the requirement. Then, look across all of the requirements to identify what phase you’re at for the job as a whole (you can take the most common phase from your self-assessed qualification). Here's an example rubric using some of the criteria from a Visual Designer role at Chipotle. 

Tactically, you can create a rubric for all the jobs you are interested in. Use these rubrics to create job “boxes” and compare them. The jobs where you are currently “practicing” and there is high room for growth are the pivotal jobs you want to chase.

Landing jobs you're under-qualified for

I know that the job market is competitive, and more qualified candidates have better odds of getting the job. This is definitely true. 

But I want to double down on one thing: you will learn the most from jobs you're the least qualified for. 

Remember my pivotal Microsoft role? I met less than 20% of the "requirements" in the job description. This could very well have been an anomaly, so now my golden rule is if I meet 50% of the criteria and feel I can do the job well, I'm going to apply. 

What are some lessons I've learned about landing roles you aren't, on paper, qualified for?

1. Referrals: Having someone inside the company vouching for you can be the difference between a rejection and an interview. 

2. Create your own experiences: If you’re lacking job experience, make projects on the side that can demonstrate your skill in the area. As an Economics student wanting to work in design, I worked on website design, attended hackathons and freelanced to build a design portfolio.

3. Highlight differentiated strengths: A friend of mine was interviewing for a product manager role on a team that supported music creators. He was less senior than other candidates, but he highlighted his own experiences as a music producer — giving unique empathy and insights into the product. He got the job by highlighting his unique assets.

Closing lessons:

Using the Pivotal Growth Model, we can see that a pivotal job is one you're under-qualified for with significant room for growth. Having some of these experiences in your career will significantly improve your trajectory. 

Summary:

1. Your early career is all about learning. Find the experiences that can help you learn about your field in the fastest period of time.

2. Look for pivotal jobs. Use the Pivotal Growth Model to see 1) how qualified you are for a role and 2) the difference between the max qualifications and your current skill level.

3. A job description is a rubric. Use it to understand how much you can learn in the role, given your current score.

4. Use all the tools in your arsenal to land roles you're under-qualified for, including referrals, working on projects and highlighting your differentiated strengths.

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Until next time,

Will

This is why I didn’t know how to answer the question I got during onboarding:

What type of team do you want to work on?

Up until this point, I had always gone with my gut. I didn’t look far ahead and definitely didn’t have a framework for choosing my next role.

So I defaulted to a list of teams based on the only criteria I knew at the time: my passions. Here’s the email I sent:

The last passion (Life Events/Moments) led to my first role as a Product Manager on the Facebook Profile team. I would be responsible for building features to help users communicate a transition in life.

The team was awesome, and the area was something I was passionate about. But I realized something: profile was a mature area. 

I think of maturity as how well-defined an area is. Back in 2005, profiles were the entire Facebook experience! The decisions around its key information (ex. showing your real name) had been made, and every person on Facebook has a profile by default. There are few unknowns in this area.

There’s value to working in mature areas - this includes expertise from people who have seen the entire growth trajectory, a high user base and a well-known brand. 

But in the last 18 months, I’ve learned that it’s always better to work in a growing area early in your career. Here’s why:

1. Learnings: There’s always more to do than people to do them when a team is growing. This forces team members to do new things that aren’t in their job description but are crucial for growth. You’ll also learn how to build a business from the ground up (in case you ever want to do that yourself, like I want to 😇).

2. Creativity: The norms are not established. This gives you the ability to shape the standards rather than inheriting decisions/processes from years ago.

3. Exit opportunities: Being a part of a growth story increases your pool of great options at the end. If you joined Google in 2004 when they just IPO'd, your profile, skills and wealth would be much higher today than had you joined Yahoo at the same time. 

4. Growing Teammates: Teams that are growing attract people who are also in a growth stage of life. They are hungry to learn and still have many decades in their career for experimenting and building things. These people may be future co-founders, employers or investors!

To identify growing areas, it’s helpful first to understand existing wisdom on the stages of maturity.

The 4 Stages of Maturity

Remember when the iPhone came out? It was 2007, and initial media coverage didn't understand what it was. Microsoft's CEO even laughed at the idea, saying no one wanted to pay $500 for a phone. Oh boy, were they wrong.

The history of the iPhone is an excellent example of the four stages of product maturity. This is a framework that helps pinpoint the future trends surrounding a product (or, as you’ll see, a career area).

The four phases are:

1. Introduction: In the early days, only enthusiasts and first-adopters try the product. The creators double down on building the product that many more people will want to use. (iPhone 2007-2010).

2. Growth: People can't get enough of the product. More and more people keep buying it, and the user base grows exponentially in a few years (iPhone 2010-2015).

3. Maturity: Many people use the product. It now needs to retain these users, focus on maintenance and enter new areas (iPhone 2015-Present).

4. Decline: People stop using the product and switch to better, newer products that serve their needs better (iPhone 2022, maybe).

It's helpful to visualize these phases across a curve:  

The stages of product maturity can apply to many things, including companies (ex. Facebook), teams (ex. Profile) and areas (ex. AI). If you had to decide on the next company you want to work at, it might help map out ones you’re interested in across a maturity curve.

Let’s say you’re interested in the auto industry. This may be a curve you draw:

Question for you: would you rather join Tesla or Ford today? 

I’d go for Tesla because it gives you the advantages of learning, creativity, exit opportunities and growing teammates we discussed above. 

Two important notes

The borders between stages are subjective. For example, I think that the iPhone is still mature, while many people probably think it’s declining. This subjectivity creates opportunity. Investing in something non-obvious, either with money or working in an area, can be a life-changing decision.

The introduction stage also has opportunities. But these are the high-risk, high reward areas. They may strike gold, or they may fizzle out. If your risk tolerance and confidence are high, teams at the introduction stage are excellent places to learn.

Chase Big Waves

In university, I interviewed Ryan Holmes, Founder and CEO of Hootsuite. I asked him for his advice for people who wanted to start businesses. 

He said,

Find a big wave. It's simple, but to use a surfing analogy, you can be a great surfer with no wave, and you won't get anywhere. Given a great wave, even average surfers can get carried along.

This advice is dead on for those of us trying to grow our careers. 

A wave is an upcoming trend. Some may be hype alone (see Bitcoin in 2016), some may be based on fundamental changes in the world (see Zoom in 2020). The further out you can see a wave, the longer you’ll have to surf it.

How do you spot a great wave?

Here are three ways to identify waves at different levels:

Analyzing an industry: an inflow of investment.

Where is money flowing? Look at where venture capitalists and institutional investors spent in 2020 and where they will spend in 2021. When comparing companies in the same industry, use Crunchbase to see the money they’ve each raised and from which investors.

Some upcoming waves (in my opinion) are in healthcare, biotech, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, and quantum computing.

Analyzing a company: superstar leaders.

Great leaders can drastically improve the trajectory of a company or team. They are also pro surfers and will only enter an area if they see significant room for growth. If an unknown company or team hires a heavy hitter, pay attention — they know something that you don’t.

Twitter has been the best way for me to stay up to date here. Follow superstars in your industry and keep tabs on their latest moves.

Analyzing a team: will this reinvent the business?

Great companies are always trying to surf new waves via projects. The projects to keep an eye on are the ones that, if successful, will reinvent the business itself. One example: Apple has been working on augmented reality glasses for a long time. If these are successful, they may replace the iPhone as the most important device on the planet. Another example? Diem (formerly Libra) and Novi (formerly Calibra) from Facebook.

Summary

Don’t rely on your passions — instead, look further out to identify big waves to surf. 🏄‍♀️

1. Join a growth area to improve the trajectory of your career and learnings.

2. Assess growth by seeing where a product is in its life cycle.

3. Always be on the lookout for big waves!

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Until next time,

Will

Hey there, it’s Will! 👋🏽 Welcome to Product Life — a weekly email about product strategy, career advice and frameworks for navigating life.

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If you're like me, there are things you want to work on in 2021. According to popular wisdom, the best way to do this is to set a New Year's Resolution. Those could be:

1. Lose 10lbs

2. Get a promotion

3. Eat more vegetables

On Jan 1st, I thought of my resolution: "Meditate daily." 🧘🏽‍♂️

I've been feeling restless and distracted recently, and I know meditation can help my mental state. On Jan 2nd, I started to reread one of my all-time favourite books, Atomic Habits by James Clear, to get me into the right headspace to take on this resolution.

But in reading, I realized something: goals don't create long-term change.

James advocates for micro-changes ("atomic habits") in your daily routines that help bring you closer to the lifestyle you want. He advocates for building a system that powers progress towards your goals. On the difference between the two:

"Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

• If you're a coach, your goal might be to win a championship. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches and conduct practice."

This idea reminds me of a team’s culture. Teams often have goals they want to hit (ex. make $1M). A team's culture is the values, actions and beliefs that guide daily activities towards that goal. Culture is how people share feedback, make decisions and hire new employees. There is a whole body of knowledge on how leaders can improve their culture to achieve better results.

The question becomes: how can we make our New Year's resolutions more effective in creating long-term change? 

I believe the answer lies in combining knowledge of habit formation and building team culture.

Here's what I'm trying this year:

1. 🔭 Zoom out from goals to values

2. 🤔 Analyze the culture around a value

3. ⏩ Build a culture of progress

Let’s give it a shot together! ☺️

🔭 Zoom out from goals to values

Goals are the outcomes we desire. They are often short term (<1 year) and involves taking a series of actions to achieve (a strategy). Here's what this may look like in practice:

These goals seem reasonable. But there are two big problems:

Firstly, success here is binary; you either lose 10lbs, or you fail. If you fail, you'll go back to your old habits. If you succeed, you're still likely to slip back into old habits right after you've hit the goal. Anchoring around outcome-based goals doesn’t set you up for success!

The second is that these types of goals are proxies for values. Values are the qualities that you deem important. Think of them as a compass to determine your direction in life. Examples of values are honesty, open-mindedness and commitment.

Living in alignment with your values can help you move towards a long-term Northstar - this is called a vision. A vision is the end destination that your values are pointing towards. 

It can be challenging to move directly towards your vision. This is why it's helpful to use values to steer you in the right direction (like a compass)!

How do we go from a resolution we have to a value we hold? Try the 3 Whys. From your goal, ask yourself, "Why does this matter?" 3x in a row. Give it a shot! Here's mine below.

• Goal: Meditate once a week

• WDTM: I want to feel calmer

• WDTM: I want better focus

• WDTM: I want to be present in everything I'm doing

From this, you may notice a value arise. For me, my desire for meditation is a proxy for presence in everything I'm doing. We can reframe the resolutions we had above to be more in line with the value we truly desire:

• Lose 10lbs ➡ Become more confident.

• Get a promotion ➡ Have more financial security.

• Meditate daily ➡ Become more present.

Why is a value better than a goal?

• Non-binary - A value is larger than a goal - you can always strive for more confidence, security or presence. This helps values avoid the downfalls of achieving (or failing to achieve) an outcome.

• Long-term - Values can be nurtured over a lifetime. It encourages long-term thinking and building a sustainable culture.

• Unique to you - Goals often reflect things we should do (ex. lose weight). Values are more unique to what you want to do. 

This year, let's anchor around a value instead of a goal.

🤔 Analyze your culture around your value

If your values are a direction, then we are taking actions to move towards or away from that direction every day.

These actions make up your culture towards that value. Culture is a collection of actions that relate to living out your values. Sometimes these actions may be in line with these values (going in the right direction), and other times, they may be at odds with our values (going in the wrong direction).

Just like a team’s culture, these actions are often unwritten rules of operating.

This is why the first step in building a better culture is to be aware of the current culture. An excellent place to start is to look at your selected value and identify all of the habits and actions that affect it. James Clear has a worksheet that I would recommend checking out! 

Here's the list of actions and habits that surround my value of presence:

We now have a better picture of the culture around our chosen value. You may choose to curb some of the negative actions on this list or invest in the positives. Either way, you have a better map of the options for living a life following your values.

⏩ Build a culture of progress

Rather than setting a single goal, I now have a list of cultural tweaks to move towards my values' direction.

Values are all about making steady progress. Progress is any change that moves you in a direction aligned with your values.

Which one of the tweaks should you focus on first? I recommend starting with the easiest ones. These are the "low-hanging fruit" that you can change that may have a big impact. Tweaking some of these will also help you build momentum.

In my list, I'm going to start with an easy fix that will have a big impact: spending less time on my phone.

When tweaking, it's tempting to go all or nothing. For example, I can say I want to spend 0 minutes on my phone every day. Drastic changes like this set you up for failure. The power of a value is that you can spread progress out over a longer time. This makes change more palatable.

For me, I'm going to reduce my screen time by 10% in January and then reevaluate on Feb 1st. If all goes well, I'll reduce screen time by another 10% in Feb.

Once you feel comfortable with one tweak, focus on improving another. This is a systematic approach that should spread well beyond 2021.

🎯 In summary:

In 2021, build a positive culture around your chosen value. You can do this in a few steps:

1. Zoom out from your goals to identify your values 

2. Become aware of the culture surrounding your value

3. Choose elements of your culture to tweak. Please don't rush to fix all of them; this is a whole life's work!

I'm going to work on being more present, starting by cutting down my screen time. What are you working on this year?

Leave a comment

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tl;dr without executing a plan religiously to the parameters set at the outset, you will never know if the strategy worked. This principle is known as Perfect Execution. Applying it can help you learn quicker and move closer to your goals.

Imagine this: you set a goal to lose 15 pounds. Your friends have been raving about Keto (a low carb, high fat diet) for weight-loss so you decide to try it for two months. On week three, you cave and devour two pizzas from Dominos. On week six you go for an all-you-eat breadsticks at Olive Garden. The two month mark rolls around and you lost 5 pounds - 66% less than your goal.

Question: was Keto a good strategy to hit your weight loss goal?

The answer is that you don't know.  Not only did you not hit your goal, but you have not validated if Keto is a nutrition plan that works for weight loss. What's worse is that you are likely going to think that you tested Keto and make an inaccurate claim that it's a bad nutrition plan.

This story illustrates a principle of product development called Perfect Execution. In order to know if a strategy worked, you need to execute religiously to the parameters set at the outset.

This is crucially important when building a product. Perfect execution can help you and your team: 

1. Validate hypotheses - Many strategies rely on hypotheses. In our keto example, one hypothesis may be that changing your diet alone (without exercise) is enough to lose 15 lbs in 2 months. To know if this is true, you need to execute perfectly to collect accurate data about the strength of that hypothesis. Only then can you accept or reject the hypothesis.

2. Identify gaps in your strategy - If you execute perfectly  and still fall short of your goal, what else do you need to do? Identifying and filling these gaps will help you and your team move closer to your goal.

3. Remove subjectivity from the results - You may have hated every minute of Keto, but the results of a perfectly executed strategy can help you be objective about its ability to achieve your goal.

How can you execute perfectly in the future?

• Set your goal, strategy and timeframe at the outset of your commitment

  • Goal: lose 15 pounds.

  • Strategy: Keto (low carbs, high fat foods)

  • Timeframe: 2 months (end on Jan 15th, 2021)

• Identify challenges and mitigates ahead of time

  • Potential challenge #1: When I get home late, I really crave carbs.

  • Mitigate: Eat 1/2 cup of almonds before going out on a late night

Next time you create a plan, focus on executing perfectly. It may sound obvious, but if you begin with the intent to follow-through and do so religiously, you are setting yourself up for success right from the start. 

Thanks for reading. I write about product management, navigating your career and solving life’s ambiguous problems, one mental model at at a time. Sign up below for weekly articles right in your inbox.

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