How I promote PMs on my team
Driving ROI by managing high-performers.
Intro
After five years of leading PMs, I can say that mastering managing high-performers yields the highest ROI. Nevertheless, taking high performers for granted will shutter your product team ‘house of cards’ in no time.
Moreover, the higher the percentage of top performers on your team, the more accute it becomes to develop the skill set for keeping high performers for the long run.
In this article, I will dive into the topic of ‘Promotions,’ the ‘Sacred cow’ leaders consciously try to keep vague.
The reality:
Top performers expect to get promoted.
And can you blame them? Promotion is the ultimate recognition.
It’s financial, as it comes with a new compensation level, it’s social, as you are getting recognized by the company leadership, and it’s brand building, as it adds credibility to the employee's brand in the job market.
Hence, misalignment around promotion expectations can kill performance and break trust. In most cases, this misalignment involves some dangling the promotion carrot quarter after quarter.
The product leader’s priority is company success.
You hire top talent for a specific job ( = job X).
Moreover, you want to ensure (after hiring and onboarding) that your rockstar PM does the job they were hired to do for a long time.
Otherwise, what is the point?
Promotions, as great as they are, will, in most cases, stop your rockstar PM from doing the job they were hired to do. Requiring you to onboard other PM to do job X.
Now, I am definitely not saying that promotions are bad. But they do add complexity and overhead, which you must be mindful of.
Do this:
Performance peak != performance trend
Reward for performance peaks, generously.
I mean one-time bonuses, equity grants, and cross-company praising. Show gratitude and take care of your team. Don’t take high performance for granted. Be creative!
Promote a long-term performance upward trend.
The long-term performance upward trend is the promotion north start you build expectations towards. It's also how you help build your team members’ long-term defensible careers.
How long of a trend? 18 - 24 months long.
Lead with transparency (early on) to bridge the expectation gap
Communicating your promotion ‘How? and When?’ early on, even before hiring. Starting as early as the hiring manager interview rounds.
You want to ensure your hire only those PMs who genuinely excited to join and do ‘job X’ for at least three years.
This is why you never use empty promotion promises as a hiring tactic as those will backfire.
In addition, re-iterate on the promotion expectations every quarter and review together with your team the long-performance trend.
Comparing only the perfomrernce of the ongoing quarter with the performance of the preceding one is not sufficent.
🟢 Three bonus tips for PMs:
Ensuring that your work materializes in building a successful company has a higher long-term impact than a premature promotion with no meat behind it.
The statement ‘Join at level Y to do job X and you will get promoted in no time’ Indicates a questionable/toxic culture. Don’t’take the job.
Avoid taking roles you don’t see yourself doing with a huge smile on your face for at least three years.