[This article is the last part of the PM compensation series. You can read the previous articles here, here and here.]
XYZ was a high-growth and successful fintech firm with some 30-odd PMs and 150 engineers. Anand, Bama and Charlie were 3 Product Managers at XYZ Inc. working in different roles within the organization.
Anand worked on growth and optimization trying to scale the already successful product from 10 to 100X.
Bama worked on new initiatives – experimenting with building new products from scratch and hoping that some will stick. The initiatives were sponsored by senior executives who wanted to take a bet on ideas which could potentially disrupt the industry.
Charlie was building a platform to consolidate product capabilities across the company. He started with bringing all onboarding flows of various XYZ products under one umbrella platform.
While Anand appeared more confident and widely perceived as a star Product manager, the other two were not perceived as very special.
One could clearly see the difference in the bi-weekly updates that each of them shares with the stakeholders. Anand’s updates were outcome-oriented. His updates were filled with success of his projects and their impact on important company metrics. This brought him visibility and also the required support from cross-functional stakeholders. Who would not want to support and be part of a success story?
On the other hand, Bama and Charlie’s updates were launch & task oriented. They were usually about the experiment launches, uninspiring initial results, lessons learnt, pivots and platform base launches which did not have a clear business value.
Over time, Bama and Charlie felt like imposters because they did not produce tangible results as Anand did. They slowly got disenchanted with their work and left the company for greener pastures.
Why did Bama and Charlie feel like an imposter? Were they not capable enough?
In my previous article, “how much product managers be paid”, I argued that the impact of different PM roles (Growth, scaling, experimenter, platform) are very different and we should see the work of some of the types of PMs as long term investments instead of ones that produce immediate ROI. In this case, both Bama and Charlie’s roles are investments for the future. Bama’s role was to launch experiments to identify the next big thing. This is filled with too many failure risks and unpredictability. ROI of Charlie’s work would be realized only at a large scale. Only Anand’s role (growth & optimization) has been set up for realizing immediate impact and success.
What is the solution?
To be fair to Bama and Charlie, it would be very difficult for either of them to define their success criteria correctly and set themselves up for success. It needs the help of the product leader (their manager) to set things right. The leader needs to do the following –
a) Define success metrics for these roles. How to do it is discussed in detail in this article
b) Make stakeholders understand why these metrics need to be different from regular product or revenue/growth metrics
c) Evangelize these initiatives across the organization so that they are viewed as investments for the longer term
d) Cite references to past investments (if any) that took time to take off but are now providing solid returns to the company
e) Think hacky – Identify a few quick wins to demonstrate the potential of these initiatives
One caveat is that getting an organization aligned around longer-term initiatives is not going to be easy. Most parts of the organization would not be trained to think in the long term especially if their functions are required to run on short-term goals. Good luck 😀
Credit cookie –
New PMs who replaced Bama and Charlie continued to build on the work that these two had left behind. A year and a half later these products started to take off. The PMs donning their role celebrated “their own victories” and showcased their success with the product. But hardly anyone remembered Bama and Charlie’s contribution to building these products.
