Career Growth Facts No One Tells You

+ Storytelling as a PM

Jul 25, 2022

11 career growth facts no one tells you:

1. Your manager needs to like you

If your manager doesn’t like you, it will be harder to get promoted. If it comes to layoffs, they won’t fight for you. So, if they don’t like you, flip them. If you can’t, it’s strategic to move - internally or externally.

2. You don’t need to like your work

We’ve been sold a lie of loving our work. It leads to discontent when the job gets tough, and over-switching. You can like the pay, impact, flexibility, perks… Paradoxically, if you stick around long enough, you’ll usually grow to like it.

3. Your area matters as much as your impact

Being on a growing profit center, you will have more opportunities. Plus better downside protection. Why play the game on hard mode?Joining a high performing company, product, and team can 2x your trajectory’s slope.

4. Getting promoted is not a meritocracy

It’s a test specific to each role. One’s company, function, manager, and peers all customize the test. Those fastest to promotion figure out the rubric. Then achieve it. Slow growers assume THEIR rubric for good will be recognized.

5. Whomever is on the promotion committee is your boss

You don’t have one boss. You have multiple: everyone on your promotion committee. You need to figure out who they are. Then figure out their individual rubrics. The fastest growers get an ‘A’ grade with every boss.

6. Everyone has areas to improve

Don’t wallow in your development feedback. Everyone has some. Just work to fix it. Separately, day to day, focus mentally on your strengths. It will carry you through with energy to crush it.

7. The majority do not actually improve

Behavior change is near impossible. People around you are getting the same feedback year after year. If you can be the type of person who does regularly improve, you will be in the minority.

8. Soft skills matter more than hard skills

Business is a team sport. That’s why corporations exist. You can be the best <insert your function> in the world. If you can’t work with people, it will limit your growth. The more senior the level, the more soft skills matter.

9. Resources gravitate to those making the most impact

Everyone is asking for a bigger team, more budget. It flows towards those, in the long run, who are making the most business impact. Without measurable results, areas which have them will get the finite resources.

10. Careers are mountains not ladders

Sometimes, a sideways or downwards move is the right way ultimately up. Even a break - to recharge - can be the best thing for you, the climber. These things are just part of the journey up the mountain.

11. Moving can earn you more

If your pay has been stagnant or below market, a move could get you paid more. This is especially true if you have been growing your capabilities and experience. Studies show switchers on average experience a 15% bump. Optimize.

Storytelling as a PM

Your communication can be 100% better if you tell a STORY. But, storytelling in product is a very special discipline.

I have seen a big difference in how well my product ideas are received when storytelling. The art of storytelling v2.0:

First, stop the 5 most common ways PM’s pitch ideas:

“Our prioritization process found this #1”
“Our leadership has already agreed on this plan”
“I believe this is the best course”
“Data from prior experiments shows”
“We did research to find”

They are too straightforward. You need a story. fMRI research shows the speaker and listener experience “neural coupling” in storytelling. Stories allows the speaker to transfer their emotions and energy to the listener. This is more convincing than any product idea reasoning.

So how do you do it? Form your product reasoning into the 6 parts of a story:

Call
Trial
Transformation
Tribulations
Climax
Return

It’s the hero’s journey, a la any Marvel Origin story. You generate interest, explain conflict, but ultimately succeed.

To demonstrate, let’s use a very common growth experiment: The signup form. In this case, we want to pursue an experiment to the form over new branding.

1. Call

“Did you know 7 out of 10 visitors to our landing page bounce?” You want to grab the reader’s attention. Usually a great hook has multiple lines. “Everyday, that’s 10K people.” Like the beginning of this post, multiple points work best.

Citing prevalence always helps, especially for growth projects. But a hook can be many things. Common product hooks include:

Specific big customer story
Result of a recent experiment
Review of recent stream of work
Your personal usage
A relatively unknown user journey

2. Trial

“The problem is there are too many fields to fill out in the signup form.” This is where you describe the problem in detail.

3. Transformation

“But what if we could reduce the number of fields from 12 to 4?” This is where you propose the solution. You provide light at the end of the tunnel. “Our user interviews showed many users did not like long forms.”

4. Tribulations

“Of course, if we do this work, it would tradeoff with new branding.” Everything has a tradeoff. This is where you explain you understand it.“That’s important for our image.” Acknowledge the other point of view.

5. Climax

“But we estimate this experiment could recover 2K users/ day.” Then you hit them with the but. And you layer the cherry on top for your suggestion. “And we could build this experiment in just 2 sprints.” You have climaxed with your reasoning.

6. Return

“Therefore, I think we should prioritize the experiment over branding next sprint.” End with the big ask. You want this work to start at the expense of other work.

As PMs, we constantly have to make the case for certain work. This is how to do it. In total, we told a short story in 10 lines. It took <45 seconds.

“The most powerful person in the world is a storyteller”
- Steve Jobs

Bonus: How Did Android Become the Most Used Software in the World?

Android is the most used software product in the world. It has over 3 billion daily active users.

Its launch is the ultimate case study for product builders:

Android was first launched in 2008, almost a year after the iPhone. However, development began much earlier. The company was founded in 2003. After toying with an OS for cameras, the team switched to phones. Google purchased them in 2005.

As revealed by CEO Eric Schmidt: “At the time, we were quite concerned with Microsoft products. This was before the iPhone revolution.” Counter-positioning against Microsoft explains many of the product decisions the team made:

1. Open Source from the Start

In the months leading up to Android’s launch, the press was clamoring over the “G-Phone.” Google didn’t release one. Instead, it released an OS so that hundreds of manufacturers could take up using it.

Google went with the cheapest price: free. It also took the Anti-Windows model of making all the code available. This made the OS much more attractive to handset manufacturers, like Samsung, who were caught flat-footed with the launch of iPhone.

These handset manufacturers ultimately took Android to the next level. In China, the country with the world’s largest number of smartphone users, 85% use a custom version of Android. The country’s leading manufacturers could have chosen Windows, but Android was open source.

2. Built for Developers

Google released a suite of developer tools using JAVA - the most popular language at the time. It even used the highly popular Eclipse as a development environment.

By comparison, developers had to use C# and Visual Basic to develop for Windows. For iPhone, developers had to use Objective-C and Xcode. They were specialized environments.

Google supplemented its developer friendly choices with a rich set of native APIs. This made Android the most attractive place to make apps for the largest number of developers.

Today, you can sync a Huawei smartwatch with a Google Home and Samsung smartphone. The same can’t be said of the Microsoft or Apple ecosystems.

3. Leveraging the Best of Google

Google had industry leading products in Search, Maps, and YouTube. Android leveraged the best of all 3 apps from the get go. This gave the OS better first party apps, in addition to many more third party apps.

It’s hard to fathom now, but from 2007-2012, iPhone users didn’t have turn by turn voice navigation! A native Google Maps iOS app was not launched until 2012. Even then, for years, the Android app was ahead of iOS. Bike directions, for instance, were on Android years earlier.

Similarly, compared to Windows phone users who were stuck with Bing search, Android was powered by Google Search.

Key lessons from Android launch -

1. Counter-positioning works: Play different games.

2. Identify your users: Where Windows and Apple targeted consumers, Android targeted developers & manufacturers.

3. Play to your strengths: Leverage what you already do well.

Product Growth

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