Defining Success as a Product lead

We all want to be successful and impactful. That is human nature and most definitely a focus for Product leads. However, what we define as “success” is a key part of whether we consider ourselves successful. This is not a “hack” to just make us feel good but truly an art of stepping back and taking in the proverbial meta view.

I think about success as Product lead in multiple dimensions

• Personal — what matters to me personally as an employee
• Team — what matters to my team
• Company — what matters to my company
• Product — (last but not the least) what matters to my customers

Success can (and should) come from all of the above. Let me elaborate using my recent conversations during coaching a PM (let’s call her Linda), who had recently joined a new company. Linda was worried that she was not being successful and had not moved the north star metric for her product. So, we talked about how to define success more holistically.

Principle: Define success more broadly so you have more chances to succeed. If success is just the bullseye in the dartboard, then the chances of you hitting it are pretty small and anything else you hit is failure - by definition. What if you defined a larger surface area for success than just the bullseye?

In Linda’s case, she was defining just moving the north star metric as success. She had just joined the company 2 months ago, and of course she was not going to move the metric i.e., succeed in 2 months by that definition.

So, we sat down and defined success in following dimensions:

1. Personal Success

• Learning: Since this was Linda’s new job, hence, learning and onboarding was a big part of personal success. So, we marked this as P0 and she acknowledged that she had indeed learnt a lot and ramped up pretty fast. Learning about the product (customers, strategy, metrics, tech stack, historical context etc.), people (her team, partner teams, stakeholders), processes (how decisions are made, how planning happens, culture of the team and company).
• Acknowledge wins/lessons: I asked Linda if there were any product lessons she had learnt or small wins in the time she was there. She realized that there were small experiments they had run and learnt something. Also, there were some small wins in terms of cleaning up the backlog and fixing some customer issues. So, I asked her to add to her bucket of success.
• Promo: She did not get promoted but her skip level wanted her to report directly to him. This was a major accomplishment in building trust with the management.
• Money: She got some extra RSUs (completely by surprise), and we added this to personal success.

2. Team success

• Trust: When Linda joined her team, they had a trust deficit in the team. So, she had set out to build some rhythms and practices like a dashboard to track top metrics, a standup to get the team to talk about day-to-day blockers, a clear prioritization of what team was spending time on. This helped drive up trust and accountability in the team. This was indeed part of success.
• Morale: Once trust went up, the team wanted to work with each other and collaborate more. And some added rhythms got the team’s morale better.
• Efficacy / productivity: She aligned the team on top initiatives and deliverables. Given the trust and morale now the team was all marching in a single direction and their efficacy and productivity was higher. This was part of what she had helped achieve and qualifies for success.

3. Company Success

• Stakeholder education: Since her product was a ML platform, a lot of sales, marketing, partner teams and other stakeholders did not understand what it did or what their team did. So, she set out on a roadshow of her platform and how it contributed to top customer facing products and metrics. This education helped orient stakeholders on what to expect and built empathy for her team with them (e.g., on the challenges for an ML platform to move certain metrics overnight or why their team needed to do some core work on collecting data to learn and train). I argued that this is a success. If key stakeholders understand our products and what to expect from them and from us, that is a win.
• Strategy: With the feedback she collected from stakeholders and customers, Linda also updated some key parts of the strategy and provided input into broader org strategy with her product’s role in it. Needless to say, this is part of success.
• Sponsorship for product: Now that key stakeholders understood her product, she was able to up-level that conversation to educate the executive management and get sponsorship for her platform product (i.e., they won’t get cut/defunded). This was definitely an important win.

3. Product success

• Top level product Metrics: This is where we started. The top-level metrics for her platform / product. Did the metrics move in the right direction, by the amount that was expected/projected. And if not, does the team understand what is the hindrance? In Linda’s case they had understood data gaps, defined some key metrics and set about to build the core pipelines to collect needed data. This was progress.
• Quality: I asked if the top-level metrics had not moved, then had there been any improvements in the quality of the product. Quality could be reliability, stability, performance, usability etc. She mentioned that the platform had definitely improved on the performance front. And so we added that to the success bucket.
• Feedback from customer: We looked at if she or the team had any better understanding of customer needs and if they had gotten any positive feedback from their customers as that would also qualify as subjective success.
• Proxy / indirect company metrics: I asked if there was any way they could figure out what was their contribution to top company/business metrics (e.g. topline GMV, Revenue, MAU etc.) just to understand as a proxy of success. And these understanding the links to these metrics and any movement is considered success.

This is not an exhaustive list. It is just elaborative; sometimes we lock our sight to a small target as success and ignore the broader success we have had in our roles and work. How are you defining your circle of success (add your comments below)?

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