Deb Liu: recommendation

Transcript context

…For people going through that are wanting to push through that and develop, and maybe in this example, what do you find is worth your time? Do you find courses are a good way to improve? Is it mentors, coaches, just doing the work? Do you have a general mental model of, "Hey, I want to improve it," say design, I don't know. Do you push people to one direction versus another to actually get better at a lot of these things? I think one of the most powerful things that we can do is actually first start in a coaching circle because getting feedback is incredibly important. If you have an amazing manager and peers that give you feedback, that's amazing. But I think often you don't have that. If you can find a coaching circle or mentoring circle of other PMs, they will actually help you see your blind spots, because I think seeing your blind spots helps you to work on them. Second is actually taking that feedback and saying, "Okay, here are the three things I want to work on." So every year, I do a new year resolution, and this is not just for PM, but across the board. I write down, here's the things I want to improve in my life, and here's what I'm going to do to do them. Having a written goal, and the goal isn't checking the box like I'm going to do X. The goal is I want more of this and here's how I'm going to get it. And every year I publish that, and then I give myself a score for the previous year. It's really, as you know, if you measure, you're going to get more of what you measure. Well, how many people are really measuring their careers? How many people are measuring the output of things that they're learning? I really encourage PM your career like you PM your product, you put so much care into writing specs, having goals, having metrics, doing reviews. How is it do you think about your career? Not nearly as much. What I encourage PMs to do is your focus group is your peers. That's where you're getting feedback from. Those are your customers, those are your peers, are the ones who are giving you feedback, who are telling you things you need to work on to make your product, your career better. The second thing is then what are you going to do about it? What a true roadmap. Often, we don't have a roadmap for our career. We have amazing roadmaps to your roadmaps, five year roadmaps, visions, all of those things for our product, and then our blind spot is ourselves. I just tell people, write out what you want to be in two years and five years. Write out your pre-mortem for where your career is going to go, and then work your way backwards. Sometimes, it's just very easy to drift from, "Oh, I have this opportunity, should I take it or not? Someone called me about X, or this company." And not to be intentional, but if you say, "Hey." Somebody called me up and she said, "I would like to be CEO by the time I'm your age." So I said, "Okay, let's work our way backwards." And we did the math and she's not even a manager today, but she's 35. I said, "To be eligible to be CEO, you need to get on a board. You need to be a GM of a very large product. How fast can you get there?" She said, "Well, I'm probably a year or two away from getting promoted and getting the opportunity to manage." "At the pace you're going, you're not going to get there." And so I've been mentoring her and coaching her and finally she found a new role. They're giving her management responsibility. y to manage." "At the pace you're going, you're not going to get there." And so I've been mentoring her and coaching her and finally she found a new role. They're giving her management responsibility. She got at a higher level, but she realized that on her path, her roadmap was going to elongate way further than when she needed to ship. Instead, we worked on a new plan, but I think a lot of PMs are like her, not because, and she's an incredible PM, but she put so much more care into her product than she really thought about her career.…

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