Ian McAllister: recommendation

Transcript context

…Would you say that driving impact is more important for a new PM or senior PM? It feels like impact is the soup within which all PMs swim and that's constantly important, but it's interesting that you mostly put that into the latter part of a career. Do you feel like with new PMs on your team you're less expecting them to think about impact and focus on impact? Well, I mean I think for junior PMs, if you're a brand new PM, then yeah, you want to have an impact, but you're really just ... You have a project or a feature to ship or something like that and you're often not necessarily given a lot of latitude to build your own roadmap. But you're asked to ship this. So you want to spec it, you want to execute and do it. But increasingly as you grow, there are opportunities to sense out and try to have a bigger impact maybe and then start to influence prioritization or roadmaps. It's just that the expectations, it goes from being a nice to have as a junior or first time PM to as you get a little more senior, hopefully if things work the way they should work, that's really how you're evaluated. Yes, you want to treat your team well and you want to do a whole bunch of other things, but take two people, one has a massive impact on the business and one who doesn't, then the right way to work should be that first person should be the one that grows and develops and is tasked and with bigger challenges just because if you're impactful at a bigger challenge, that's even more important for the business. So I think that's a good way to think about the flywheel of product leadership. It feels like a lot of times you get lucky as a new PM. You work on a project that ends up having a lot of impact that you didn't necessarily drive. You just happen to work on something that, wow, this was a huge deal and that feels like an important thing to optimize for a little in your early career is work on something that's likely to have a lot of impact even if you're not responsible for setting the strategy and prioritizing.…

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