Deb Liu: recommendation

Transcript context

…Great, we'll put that in the show notes. You could read about it, but I use that as marking time and actually being able to make progress just like you do for your product. What are your metrics? What are you measuring? The second thing, I do think that for your career, I should work on a template for this, I actually have a pre-mortem I wrote when I first joined Ancestry for example, of what I hope to accomplish in 10 years here. I had a template for how our product would evolve over two years and five years that I've started with and anchored the company against. We show that every all hands for example. These are the kinds of things that are useful because you're now... And then each of the PMs takes the vision that we put together when I first started with our leadership team and says, "Here's how my product contributes to us evolving our product to the two-year, five-year roadmap." And so it's great to actually have an anchor, and it's the same thing if you don't have some sort of measurement for your career that every opportunity comes along, it has to be evaluated on its own. But if you say, "My goal is to reach management by X, to have the opportunity to head up a product by Y to do X," then you can say, "Does this opportunity take me closer or further away?" You actually now have an evaluation criteria, and I think too often it's by instinct. You'd have too much instinct on, "Well, is this the right thing?" But it might actually take you off course. And so instead actually focusing on, "Hey, that's scope creep. Let's focus on what's important. The thing that matters most is what matters. Let's focus on that." Basically it's like a personal vision statement or a vision for your product for yourself, I love that.…

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