Every single person that I coach, has the goal of progressing their career. However, they’re often not sure what this actually looks like – or how to stay sane as they take on even more responsibility and juggle more plates.
One of the most important things that I learnt in my Product career, is that it is not just about getting the promotion. It’s about getting the promotion that will allow you to thrive.
It is about growing your career and excelling in a way that is authentic to you.
This is the only way that you will achieve longer term career satisfaction, avoid burnout, and really progress in the most sustainable way. Even better, you’ll be even more in love with everything that you get to do each day.
Try to jump the game in any other way, and you’ll likely be left feeling unsatisfied and trapped – the money might be good, but that’s a high price to pay when we spend at least 8,736 hours a year at work!
So – here I am to share all of my tips on how to not just get the promotion, but do it in a way that really works for you!
PS. If you’re in this exact position – I’m running a course in November that will be jam packed with value and actionable tips for you to understand what you want from your career and how to make that happen. Find out more here.
How to navigate your product career and actually love it.
Through all of the work that I’ve done personally, and the work that I’ve done with the people I coach, I’ve found that the key things people need are to:
- Know the career path that they want to follow
- Develop the right skillset to progress
- Understand their own values, and how to shape a career that aligns with these
This article will give you some guidance and tips to help you to understand all of these areas.
This is the 6 step process that I recommend everyone to work through. By the end of it, you’ll have a better understanding of these areas, and have a clear action plan that really allows you to excel.
So let’s get to it!
Step 1: Understand your overall aims.
Understanding your overall aims is essential to all of the other decisions that you will make. Knowing what you want to achieve, not just in your career, but also in life – will help you to choose the right environments to work in, and allow you to set up the right foundations to allow you to see success through your career. When we get to the end of this article, you’ll be crystal clear on how to use your overall aims to support you – but for now, we’ll just focus on taking the time to understand them.
Goal setting
The first area to start, is in identifying 3 clear goals for yourself. These don’t just need to be career focussed – but the career might be the most important part for you.
How do I do this?
I split my thinking into 4 categories:
- Relationships (family, friends, romantic)
- Adventures & things
- Growth
- Career
For each one, I think about what I want my life to look and feel like in one years time. You can also think further into the future (3-5 years) to allow you to create plans to ladder up to this. However, one thing that I’ve found at least in my life, is that my goals / aims are changing so frequently at the moment that one year is perfect for me.
In each category, I note this down, being clear on specific goals that will help me to achieve this. I also write down why I want this, as our why really helps us to achieve our goals.
For example in my growth section – I want to:
Look and feel like an speaking expert on Product Management topics.
- Grow my comfort zone of public speaking by speaking on bigger stages (250 people +).
- Why: I want to share my knowledge and wisdom with even more people, and be perceived as an expert on the subjects that I love, so I can spend even more time working in spaces I’m passionate about and help others to grow.
This process will look and feel differently for everyone. I really recommend by starting to journal everything you can think of. When you read these back, you’ll notice which ones feel truly aligned to what you want. & this is the important thing, focus on you – not just what society expects from you.
From here, you want to narrow your goals down to your top 3 – so you have clear focus and ways to make decisions.
It’s actually an incredible exercise and I love the time I allow myself to sit and write about what I truly want – so I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
These goals might not all be career related, but they might influence how you grow your career. For example, my international relationship means that I really want to keep growing my career remotely to provide me with the flexibility that I need.
Values
Your values are also essential to making sure you shape your career in a way that you love – we’ll talk about how to use them later.
How to identify your values
Start by listing out all of the words that describe the things that you want. These might also be areas that you already use to guide your life decisions. Try these prompt questions if you’re struggling:
- What drives your ambition?
- What drives your relationship choices?
- What qualities do you dislike in other people? (your values are likely the opposite!)
- Which factors have been key drivers of major decisions that you have made in your life so far?
- Where do you feel like you’re lacking in your life at the moment, but really want to focus?
You might end up with a list of 20/30 words. If these are synonyms – pick your favourite word and cross out the rest.
Review your list and see which words resonate with you the most when you read them back. See which words you mentioned most frequently.
Try to narrow this down to a list of 5 values maximum. Some examples of mine are:
- Freedom
- Growth
- Balance
I use these to guide my decisions on what I do with my career, how I work with people in my career, opportunities that I take – and most importantly, I use these to reflect each week to see if I’m living in line with the things that I care about. If I’m not, I can make tweaks to allow me to serve myself better.
You might try out your values for a couple of months and realise that they don’t all fully resonate. You might then decide to drop some of them, or change them. Our values also change over time – so this will be an iterative process.
Both of these areas might not feel like they have too much to do with your Product management career, but trust me – they really do. They especially influence the part I mentioned at the start about staying sane. You can only shape your career around yourself, if you know what serves you first.
Step two: Understand your Product Management career aims
You might have already identified these and been super clear on what this looks like as you were identifying your career goals. If so, skip ahead!
You might know that you want a promotion, but not be 100% clear on what this looks like.
Here are some questions that you might be asking yourself:
- Do I want to manage a team, or work as an individual contributor?
- Do I want to remain on a platform team, or try working on a customer facing team?
- Do I want to deal with strategy, or focus on solving problems?
- Do I want to be involved with budgets etc?
Every single Product Management career looks different. Every job spec varies. You might have clear answers to these questions and therefore know which kind of roles and companies you want to apply for. Your perfect next step might even be at your current company.
If you’re not sure, then look at ways that you could assess what you like and don’t like. Can you shadow another team for a while? Can you get more exposure to topics like strategy?
You also don’t need to have all of this figured out – sometimes you have to take a new role, try it out and see what you like / don’t like. However, the clearer you are – the easier it will be to take your next steps.
Step three: Assess your strengths, and where you need to develop to grow your PM career
I always recommend PMs to grow their careers based on their strengths.
You absolutely need to make sure that you don’t have huge weaknesses / gaps – but you’re far more likely to succeed as you progress your career if you play to your strengths and get other people to fill your gaps. This is one of the most important exercises to help you to get a promotion, and understand how you want to operate and where you want to focus within that role.
Assessing your skills
A lot of companies now offer some sort of career skills matrix, so you can assess how you’re performing and if you have any gaps.
If you don’t have one of these in your company, then try using this skillset as a baseline. Sit down with your manager and find out which skills they deem to be important in your company and if they would add any.
It’s super important to assess where you think you sit, but also get your manager’s opinion and maybe ask some peers. The more rounded your feedback, the more you can assess where you might want to focus.
From here – you might want to dial up your strengths and really shout about them, so people can see how good you are in this space. If you have any big gaps, you can make an action plan to plug them.
You should have a clear view of what it would take to get promoted at your company, and how much evidence you need to produce to show you’re capable of operating at that level.
Step four: Understand where you actually want to focus your career as a Product Manager
It’s not enough to just know what your gaps are and how to plug these – this won’t keep you sane! One of the most valuable things that you can do as a Product person is to assess where you like to operate. The PM skillset is so varied, and there is no way that we can achieve it all. If we know what we like and don’t like – then we can shape our roles to allow us to stay passionate about everything that we do.
In this skills matrix, there is also a column to note down whether you love a skill / activity and if it gives you energy (or not!). Once you’ve identified the areas you love / don’t – you can work out if you can:
- Delegate
- Automate
- Choose a role where you don’t need to do this so much
Step five: Understand exactly how to shape your PM career to serve you
Choosing a company and a role.
In this step, you’ll take everything that you’ve now identified – and work out how to use this.
Given your goals, your values and your passions, you can assess whether your current company and roles available will meet these.
For example – if you’re goal is to spend more time with your family, then you might be looking at a different company to the one that you would choose if your main value is money.
Really use these to be clear on what a great company and role would look like for you. How demanding would it be? How many teams would you be responsible for? How much flexibility would they offer? How much growth would you get to experience?
Choosing how you act within your PM role
Beyond these overall decisions, we also have the power to shape how we act in our role, and how others act towards us.
For me, this is one of the most important areas you will learn to support you for the rest of your life!
As you move through your career, often demands can get harder and the stress can feel like it is more.
If you learn how to progress your career in a way that serves you – you will be able to keep working on things that you love, and be able to do this in a way that works for you.
I had to learn a lot in my Product career – particularly the power of setting boundaries and saying no. I grew my career as a people pleaser, desperate to impress. I took on any opportunity that would come my way. I did this until it reached the point where I didn’t feel like I could actually do anything well. I was working crazy hours, on the verge of burnout. This didn’t actually serve anyone. The work was done, but it wasn’t too the best standard. Yes a lot of things moved, but things also slipped. Most importantly – it just wasn’t sustainable.
I have heard exactly the same story from so many PMs. We often wait until we hit burnout before we make change. It doesn’t have to be that way.
It will be rare that anyone tells you to put you first in your career, but that is what I am here for. I’m not saying that you should be a total bum, but I am saying that by putting you first – you’ll actually deliver your best work and be the most pleasant to be around (for everyone).
Using your values
Look at the values you set. Understand what these are. If these are things like growth – work out how you can keep creating opportunities to grow and learn in your role. Did you note down career goals that will help you to grow? Or goals in growth? Work out how you can weave these in to your work.
If one of your values was balance – work out how you can create balance in your work. Does this look like setting a boundary to not work past 5.30pm? If so, block your diary out. Block some time at 5pm to make a note of everything that you haven’t achieved that you would work on after 5.30pm. The first week or two of practising this will feel horrible. You’ll be tempted to break your boundary because it’s easier. However, after a couple of weeks you’ll see patterns of what has caused you to need to work later – and then you might be able to find ways to solve the route causes of this. You’ll also start to see the benefits of not working so late.
There are so many different examples of ways to succeed depending on your values.
Using your your passions and strengths
When it comes down to shaping your role, you can also try to shape the tasks that you work on and how you operate.
You might be able to delegate some tasks, or work out how to spend less time on them. There are a lot of tasks that PMs take on, that the team could support with. For example, writing Jira tickets.
As you grow your career, you will be able to shape people and teams around you that can support you in certain areas. For example, I love big picture thinking & strategy – but I like working closely with others to check the details behind my workings.
I also love making sure that I lead in an authentic way. I love collaboration, ensuring that everyone knows the vision and direction, and empowering others to succeed. The more I’ve grown my career, the more that I’ve been able to work in this way in my teams.
In November, we’ll talk through exactly how to achieve these things, and talk about your blockers – to allow you to build a career that you love. Join the waitlist!
Step six: Creating a clear action plan for your product promotion
Back to one of your most important goals – getting promoted!
You should now have a really clear idea on what a good promotion would look like for you. You might not be able to secure your ideal role straight away, but being aware of this will allow you to take the right steps to get there. Everything else we covered will allow you to enjoy this along the way.
The steps that you need to take to fast-track your promotion are:
- Shout about your strengths. You can do this in a way that is authentic to you.
- Share your knowledge: talk about your product wins in slack, in a weekly newsletter or show and tells. Do this in a way that feels like a knowledge share to allow others to learn too.
- Start something that your passionate about: a guild, coaching others, a project.
- Get yourself known: input in to other products and teams that you have a connection with.
2. Create an action plan for the areas that you need to develop
- Find areas of your product that allow you to grow these skills
- Network and ask for advice from experts in these areas
- Find other teams / products that you can get involved in to dial this up
3. Make sure you carve out time to focus on this.
If you find that you’re already stacked in your role and don’t feel like you can grow, then rank where you are spending your time and make sure it serves you.
Put time aside each month to review this, and remember – boundaries really help in this space.
4. Apply for roles and companies that serve you
Identify these based on your goals, values and passions – then start applying, highlighting where you really excel!
5. Reflection
Reflect at least once a month on the progress you’re making on this action plan, and how you’re working with your values. Don’t make too many changes at once, but if you don’t feel like you’re making the progress you want – tweak one or two things to allow you to really focus on where you want to excel.
Conclusion
I’ve absolutely loved writing this guide. It combines so many of the topics that I have found the most valuable in allowing me to shape a career that I really love. From identifying my values to setting boundaries, I’ve found that my best growth has come from a place where I feel so content and aligned with what I want to achieve.
From my own career, and the careers of those that I’ve coached – it is so so clear that following these steps, and really allowing yourself to spend time focussing on your plans and goals will serve you for many years to come.
You’ll perform your best, and be your happiest – leading to the most scalable long-term career growth for you.
So as much as it can feel so challenging to take time out of your schedule to focus on these topics, I can’t recommend it enough.
PS. Pre-register for the November course where I will guide you through every single step of this process, so you can create the most incredible Product Management career.
If you’re looking for your first PM role – check out this article to see how to land one without any PM experience.