How to make career decision

src: How to make career decision - 2024-08-28

During my time at Facebook, I was fortunate to manage a lot of Rotational Product Managers (RPMs). RPMs would do multiple 6-month stints in different parts of the org, then at the end of the rotation, they would choose a full-time placement.

At the end of their rotation, I would always initiate the same conversation:

• “How are you going to choose your next rotation?”
• “How are you thinking about full-time placement after you finish your rotations?”

After a number of these conversations, I realized that many struggled with making a career decision. But it is a key one to understand how to make. We all face this type of decision multiple times throughout our careers.

• “Should I leave my current role?”
• “How do I compare or choose between two or more opportunities?”
• “What is preventing me from moving forward?”

Your answers to these questions are some of the most impactful decisions you will make in your career. As operators, all of our eggs are in one basket at a time, and we get a limited number of swings at the plate.

To help others answer these questions, I wanted to share how I have thought through them with a specific framework.

Impact Powers Career Progression

When thinking through these situations, people often solve for the wrong things. Most often, people think about career advancement as increases in compensation. Compensation and career advancement are correlated, but not the same. Your compensation increases because you are creating a lot of impact. Compensation is the output, impact is the input.

I like to think about Impact as the thing that powers your career progression. It is what you are solving for when you are trying to make career progression decisions. Evaluating impact isn’t easy. It is complicated by a few factors:

• Impact is the result of multiple other variables.
• Those variables are interrelated and have confounding factors.
• Impact can be subjective to the individual.
• A lot of times you aren’t even aware of what is holding you back, or what to evaluate on.

This leads people to a lot of common traps when making career decisions.

The Common Traps Of Career Decisions

Complicated career decisions have many traps that are easy to fall into. There are 6 common ones that I have seen:

1. Choosing To Work On The Shiny Object

When I asked the Rotational Product Managers what they were going to choose for their placement, one answer I would hear time and time again was some version of “I think it would be cool to work on xyz visible project.” Just because a project seems “cool” or “visible” within the org does not mean it is the best move to grow your career.

People assume that the cool shiny thing will get them visibility, have the resources it needs, or be reputable to put on the resume. But none of that matters if your manager doesn’t give you the space to work well, or your team isn’t the right team to solve that problem. You still have to evaluate all the components rather than take them as givens otherwise you overestimate the value of working on something shiny vs. what you actually need in order to grow your career.

“When I shifted from running all of central marketing for Uber to “Innovation” I was so excited to work on Autonomous Cars and Uber Elevate (flying cars). While those projects gave me unique insight, it was actually my work on Uber Freight and Driver Education that was both more satisfying and rewarding. As a growth person, having actionable customer needs vs. prospective customer needs meant my skills were more applicable to the problems both were facing at that moment. So my impact was significantly more measurable and tangible to both myself and the teams I worked with.”

- Adam Grenier (former Reforge Partner; ex-Uber, HotelTonight)

2. “I Just Need To Work On Myself More”

A second trap is thinking that you just need to work on yourself in order to grow your career. For example, “To progress, I just need to get better at [insert skill.]” But you are only one part of the equation.

There is a whole other part of the equation, which is your environment. Your environment either limits or amplifies your own ability to get better at a skill. Leaving this out of the equation when making career decisions leads to navigating yourself to very frustrating situations where you feel like you are getting better but that isn’t translating to impact and career progression. Remember, the variables of your environment are just as important as the variables of you.

“After a few years of working on the Ads & Pages team at Facebook, I had the opportunity to interview with other teams as I looked for a new role. The best advice I received was to think about the kind of environment I wanted to work in - who I wanted to work with, what I wanted to work on, and what I wanted to learn from that experience. It helped me realize that the skills I wanted to learn would be a lot harder to cultivate in that environment because the teams were so large that I needed to play a specific role, one that only accounted for a fraction of what I wanted to learn. Ultimately, it helped me realize that the best thing for me was to leave Facebook and join a company that had a better environment for what I was looking for at the time.”

- Behzod Sirjani (Reforge Partner, ex-Slack, Facebook)

3. Short-Term Thinking

Excellent operators can easily fall into the trap of short-term thinking — always being focused on the next project, the next hurdle, or the next milestone. But this can end up leading to three things:

• Hitting a local maximum very quickly.
• Not realizing you are at a local maximum.
• Not having a view of how to get out of the local maximum.

You need to pick your head up and evaluate what the current ceiling is for you and understand if your environment has truly set you up for success to reach that ceiling.

“This is probably one of the hardest challenges I see my teams struggle with. There is both a strong sense of just “keeping my head down and incrementally getting better day by day” and also a strong sense of loyalty that comes up when picking your next move or role - either loyalty to your current company, your current manager, or current project. However, often the right move is to really shake it up and try something entirely new and that takes a longer-term view on your options.”

- Joanna Lord (CMO at Reforge; ex-Skyscanner, ClassPass)

4. Solving For Brand

For better or worse, working for a top brand company does help you progress in your career. It helps create a signal, which provides you with more opportunities and leverage down the line. Top brands also tend to give you access to good learning environments, world-class managers, and top compensation.

But, and this is a big but, there are tons of “good” brands that don’t have these things. Bad managers, roles, lack of scope, and other important factors can still exist. There is a difference between solving for brand, and considering it in the overall equation. Going to a brand just because of the brand is a bad idea. You need to evaluate it thoughtfully vs. using it as a shortcut to the decision.

5. The Seductive Cesspool Of Mediocrity

Every year I sit down and ask myself a series of questions. More on those questions later, but what I’m trying to do is avoid what I call the seductive cesspool of mediocrity. It’s easy to work yourself into a situation where you are good at something and it’s comfortable. But if you let that sit for too long, it translates into hitting a ceiling on learning, which can lead to overall unhappiness.

At the end of the day, you are responsible for pushing yourself. Having a systematic way to recognize where you are, what’s changed, and where you need to go helps make affirmative decisions of what you need to do in your career to move forward.

6. Mixing Perception & Truth

When I was trying to decide to go from being a Product Lead at Facebook to Head of Growth at Instagram, I received a lot of feedback from really smart people that it was a bad move. At the time, there was an outside perception that the Instagram team didn’t care about growth. So those outsiders were giving me feedback based on that perception.

This is a common scenario. You have an important career decision to make, therefore you seek outside advice and opinion. The problem is mixing that opinion with actual truth. Outside advice is going to be given based on whatever outside perception there is on the situation. But perception does not equal truth. It’s hard for people to disentangle these two things.

You have to go through the interview process, do your own investigation, and put in the work to understand what is truly happening. This is what I did, and I decided to make the move despite that feedback. It was one of the best career moves I’ve made.

“The best advice I got from an old mentor was “to do the work to form my own opinion” when considering a new role or a move within a company. It’s always good to get inputs from others but it will always come from their experiences and biases and those don’t necessarily transfer to you. It’s important to do your own evaluation.”

- Joanna Lord (CMO at Reforge; ex-Skyscanner, ClassPass)

In the end, it wasn’t that the Instagram team didn’t care about growth. They absolutely did. They just didn’t want to do it in a way that was detrimental to the user experience. The following framework gave me a lot of conviction to investigate the right areas, get to my own truth, and make the choice.

As you navigate complicated career choices, it helps to think through your ideal advancement trajectory. The FREE Career Roadmap template, which is part of the Accelerating Your Career module in our Product Leadership program can help you chart what success really looks like to you.

Impact = Environment x Skills Framework

Let’s revisit what we’ve established so far. Career decisions, like which role should I take next, are some of the most impactful decisions you can make. Most of the time we are optimizing for career progression. Impact is the thing that powers career progression. But solving for impact can be difficult because:

• Impact is the result of multiple other variables.
• Those variables are interrelated and have confounding factors.
• Impact can be subjective to the individual.
• A lot of times you aren’t even aware of what is holding you back, or what to evaluate on.

So what do we do? The framework I’ve used is: Impact = Environment x Skills.

What this means is:

• We need to solve for is Impact.
• Impact is the product of our Environment and our Skills.
• If our skills are great, but the environment is wrong (or vice versa), then we aren’t set up for success.

It’s Not About A Spreadsheet Of Inputs

The goal of the framework is not to try and boil a decision like this down to a set of spreadsheet inputs that spits out a “right” answer. Instead, the goal of the framework is to:

• Be able to name the individual variables that are inputs into the decision.
• Evaluate each individual variable in a structured way.
• Understand the relationship between each variable.
• Narrow the decision down to the true problem (or most important variable) so that you can focus your energy on grappling with that piece.

Doing these things helps build conviction behind a decision. What I’d like to do for the rest of this post is break down the following:

• The variables in the framework
• Why the variables are important
• Step-by-step on how to evaluate each variable
• Common scenarios and situations

Environment

Your Environment is everything that enables you to do great work that is outside of your direct control. There are a few major sub-variables of Environment:

• Manager - Your manager isn’t just someone you report to. It is the person responsible for growing your career and shaping your output. This person should be invested in helping you do your best work. This variable can only be evaluated by talking to the people they currently and formerly managed.
• Resources - Resources are more than people and capital. Resources are the things you need to do the job well. For some roles you may need process, admin support, and a budget. In others you need no red tape, the space to be creative and take risks, or the ability to take long term bets.
• Scope - Your scope is the runway you have to do your best work. You need to evaluate how your scope aligns to what the company needs and what you are capable of handling. You want scope that is a little bigger than what you are currently capable of, but not so big that you have a hard time executing. You want to look for situations where the immediate scope is clear, with more on the horizon.
• Team - There are three components to team. Do you have the number of people you need? Is the team you have capable? Is the team functioning well? A lot of times you are missing one of these three things. Ideally you have a capable, high functioning team. If you do, then it is typically easy to make a case to get more people. But when you have a team that isn’t capable or high functioning, it is hard to make a case for more.
• Compensation - Your compensation is a reflection of the work you are doing. If you are killing it in the role, but don’t feel fairly compensated, it will be a drag on your motivation. Most importantly, the company compensation philosophy needs to enable hiring the people you need to execute well. If your product is around machine learning, but the company isn’t able to or willing to pay the rates for machine learning engineers, then you won’t be able to go very far.
• Company Culture - The culture of the company needs to align with your beliefs and working style. Things like work-life balance are included in culture. The more misaligned the working culture is, the less motivated or enthusiastic you will be about the work.

Skills

Skills are the things that are within your direct control that enable your success. Remember, you can work hard at your own skills, but you can still have an environment that doesn’t allow you to move things forward.

The exact skills will vary from function to function and role to role. But there tend to be four common areas of skills:

• Communication - In any function, a key part of progression is your ability to get better at what you convey, how you convey it, and whom you convey it to.
• Influence/Leadership - As an IC, you are responsible for influencing your peers on your direct team. As you become a manager, you need to influence the people you directly manage, but also indirectly influence people you don’t manage. Then as you move up in management, you do less direct downward influencing and more indirect influencing across the company. Influence is the hardest skill, because it depends on the characters around you. You can be great at it, but perhaps the people around you aren’t.
• Strategic Thinking - Strategic thinking is your ability to see the forest through the trees. As an IC you learn to do the work. As you grow in your career, you need to learn how you anticipate the work. You need to understand the bigger system, the needs of the system, and where you and your team align with that system.
• Execution - Your execution skills are the nuts and bolts of your specific role. As a few of the other Reforge EIRs and I noted in Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader and Marketer to Marketing Leader, you initially get judged on your own execution early in your career. It is a pre-requisite for becoming a manager, even though it isn’t correlated with management skills. Once you become a manager, you are judged on the execution of your team, not yourself, which means you have to rely more on the other skills mentioned.

How To Use Impact = Environment x Skills Framework

Lets walk through a step-by-step of how to use the framework. We’ll go through 5 steps:

• Spell Out Your Variables
• Give Each Variable A Score
• Identify What Matters Most
• Evaluate Your Ability To Change The Variable
• Understand The Time Horizon Of Change

1. Spell Out Your Variables

The first step is simple. Lay out the variables in your impact equation. Being able to name the atomic units of what creates impact already puts you ahead of the rest. Doing this creates the ability to think about each one independently and deeply. It will be easier to ask important questions like:

• What is happening with this variable?
• Which ones are in flux?
• Where are there weaknesses?
• Which ones are most important?

2. Give Each Variable A Score

The exact score of each of these variables is subjective. Whether something is a 1 vs. a 1.1 doesn’t matter. The point of the score is to use it as a forcing function to think through each variable in a more concrete way. At its core, for each variable I’m trying to gauge three questions:

• What is helping?
• What is hurting?
• To what extent?

To answer these questions, I like to rank each variable on a scale of 0 to 2, where 1 is neutral, less than 1 means the variable is hurting me, and greater than 1 means it is helping me. To help make this a little easier:

• 0 to .25 = Major Bottleneck
• .5 = Hurting Me A Lot
• .75 = Slightly Hurting Me
• 1 = Neutral
• 1.25 = Slightly Helping Me
• 1.5 = Helping Me A Lot
• 1.5 to 2 = Major Amplifier

Example Variables

Let’s go through a few example variables and how they might fall on this scale.

Evaluating The Manager Variable

• Major Bottleneck = Your manager isn’t sharing the proper context you need to do your best work. They also aren’t recognizing tradeoffs, and just keep piling work on. Not helping to unblock constraints. No useful feedback or conditions of satisfaction. You don’t feel like they believe in you or are actively investing in your success.
• Hurting A Lot = ****Your manager might be doing one of the thing (context, feedback, tradeoffs, unblocking constraints) but none of the others.
• Slightly Hurting = Your manager is creating some light friction to getting your work done. They may be sharing context, light feedback, but not helping unblock constraints.
• Neutral = You are not actively learning from your manager, but they also aren’t getting in your way.
• Slightly Helping = Your manager is helping with resourcing and removing some areas that are blocking your work. But you might not be getting the feedback you need to be making large learning gains.
• Helping A lot = Your manager is giving you clear guidelines, expectations, regular feedback, holding you accountable, and gives you public credit for positive outcomes.
• Major Amplifier = A manager that is a major amplifier is a sponsor for you. They have a fundamental belief in you and are actively investing in getting you to the next level. They seek out opportunities for you internally and externally,

Evaluating Resources

Here is an example of what each of these values might look like for resources.

• Major Bottleneck = You are missing one or more key people where the work is dependent on having them. In addition, there is no head count, recruiting, or path to making real progress.
• Hurting A Lot = Your team is missing a key person/skillset where the work is dependent on that role. The team is unable to make real progress, but there is an active plan to fill the role.
• Slightly Hurting = Your team is fully staffed, but 2 out of the 5 people are junior so need a lot of extra guidance which means a slower path to expected outcomes.
• Neutral = Your team is staffed, no major holes, but might have a couple of B players or hiring is reactive. It’s not hurting, but it’s not a tailwind either.
• Slightly Helping = You have most of what you need, but there isn’t flexibility to move budget or head count around when needed.
• Helping A Lot = You have A players with enough budget but are still lacking some clarity around strategic direction. Good teams can usually find ways to create value regardless.
• Major Amplifier = The team around you is aligned on a clear vision and strategic plan. They are proactively hiring against that plan, hiring A players, including the team in the hiring process, and getting close to the budget you need.

3. Identify The Variables That Matter The Most

When you evaluate each variable, you may first look at them as separate and distinct. But in reality, they tend to influence each other. You have to consider these intersections to identify the root cause and therefore the most important variable to consider.

For example, you’ve rated people resources as severely hurting. There is someone key missing from the team that is preventing real progress. But is that the real problem? Or is the real problem that your manager isn’t strongly advocating for the resource and therefore it isn’t getting prioritized? Or have you not communicated the need and the impact of this resource strongly enough?

These variables work in concert with each other so you need to dig to the root cause. But once you identify the root cause, you have significantly simplified your decision, because you are able to focus your energy, and grapple with what to do about it.

4. Evaluate Your Ability To Change Each Variable

Making a decision isn’t just about where the variable is today, but what you are able to do about it. Your ability to change each variable is not evenly distributed. Some are harder to change than others.

Your Ability To Change Environment Variables

Your ability to change your Environment variables is dependent on where you sit in the org. If you are a manager, you have a higher ability to change things like resources and team culture.

But if you are an individual contributor, you have less ability to change these things. Your manager is typically the one in control. That is why when all else is equal, you should always choose a situation with the best manager.

Your Ability To Change Skill Variables

Within Skill variables, you have the ability to change your execution the most, and then communication and strategic thinking. Influence is a tricky one. It is harder to change because it depends on the characters around you, not just yourself.

5. Evaluate The Time Horizon On Each Variable

Knowing where each variable is at today and your ability to change them isn’t enough. You need to understand the time horizon to change that variable. You could be in control of a variable, but it could still be 9 months of a heavy lift.

For example, a common scenario is that what you signed up for has changed and now your skills don’t match. You have high control to change your skills, but it could be 9 months to a year to do so. You now have a concrete decision to make. Find a new situation that aligns better with your skills, or be proactive about communicating the gap to your manager and finding ways to improve. Just waiting for negative feedback in performance reviews is a losing strategy.

Keys To Using Impact = Environment X Skills Framework

There are a few keys when using this framework.

It’s The Product, Not The Sum

I mentioned this before, but it is worth repeating. It is the product of these variables, not the sum. At the highest level, if your skills are great but your environment is wrong, then you aren’t set up for success. Or if your environment is great, but you don’t have the skills to create impact, that you are also not set up for success.

This is also true for all the sub-variables. If your strategy is terrible, it doesn’t matter how well you are at communicating, executing, and the other variables. No amount of working hard is going to get you out of that hole. Looking at these variables as a sum misrepresents your true ability to create impact and drive outcomes.

The Most Important Variable In The Entire Equation Is Your Manager

My personal belief is that the most important multiplier in the entire equation is your manager. A great manager can heavily influence your scope, advocate for more resources, help you develop your skills, guide you to better execution, and more. So even in situations where the other variables are ranked low, if your manager is a major amplifier (1.5 to 2) I recommend giving them the confidence time to figure it out.

Communication Is The Most Important Skill Variable

One of the most important pieces of advice I ever received was from Madhu Muthukumar, ex-Dir Product at Facebook and now Head of Product at Robinhood. He said, “Invest as much time in storytelling as you do in execution.” Great execution with poor communication limits your impact over time.

You could be doing great work, but without great communication then it won’t receive the attention that it deserves. Many get frustrated by this because they see great communicators who are poor at execution get more credit and attention than they do. You need to embrace that communication is more influential than the other skill variables.

The Unnamed Is The Most Challenging

It is hard to solve a problem when you don’t know what the problem is. That’s why a major goal of a framework like this is to just build awareness of the problem by going through the variables in a structured way. Through this process, you’ll surface or clarify problems that weren’t concrete before.

Your Variable Scores Change Over Time

It is important to remember that the scores for each of these variables change over time. Your team changes, your environment changes, you get better at things, etc. Don’t wait for a new job offer, frustration to peak, or something else to force this evaluation. Take control of it yourself and have a time to re-evaluate these variables on a consistent basis. For me that’s once a year, but for others it might be different.

“When I was leaving Facebook, I considered starting my own consulting practice. However, I didn’t have the confidence in my own abilities and I felt like I’d only seen one way of doing things, even though Facebook grew 7X in the time I was there. During my time at Slack, that seed of an idea continued to grow, and as I got exposure to more companies and invited to consult with other teams, I realized that the missing part of the equation was my own execution. Once my execution got to where I wanted it, I was ready to make that leap. What would have been a bad decision in 2017 ended up being the best decision in 2020.”

- Behzod Sirjani (Reforge Partner, ex-Slack, Facebook)