PM Expectations
The purpose of a company is to bring a product vision to life. Everything we do is in service to the product, including your expectations. The most important part of your performance assessment is the results delivered by your team (not you). Then it's your contribution to those results. Finally it's your contribution to building a more capable org.
Product Impact. You’re exceeding expectations when you set aggressive 50/50 goals and hit at least half of them. Note that you can still exceed expectations even when you miss targets, as long as the goal is important and the targets aggressive.
| Goals | Target | Expected EOH |
|---|---|---|
| Goal #1 | ||
| Goal #2 |
Strategy is an adaptable plan that coordinates actions to achieve a goal. Good strategies have multiple plans operating at the same time. At a high level, you're expected to continually create plans, reinforce the ones that succeed, and cut the ones that don’t.
More specifically, you're expected to:
- Understand the situation, monitor how it unfolds, and frame it clearly in reviews and emails
- Define clear goal(s)
- Create adaptable plans to achieve your goal(s)
- Surface bad news fast; accuracy > speed > polish
- Provide a continuing stream of options on how to adapt plans
- Help decision makers evaluate the options
- Enable rapid switching between options
You’re exceeding expectations when you do the above, with minimal oversight, and develop plans that have a direct throughline to product impact delivered: plan → experiment(s) → results.
Execution is the ability to get things done. It is more important than strategy because we cannot evaluate a strategy if we do not execute it perfectly. At a high level, you're expected to maintain a high, but not perfect, do/say ratio. Do what you say you’re going to do ~80% of the time.
More specifically, you're expected to:
- Set aggressive 50/50 target(s)
- Report progress toward goal(s) every 2 weeks; the faster we know what’s not going to plan, the faster we can adapt our strategy
- Assess your team's internal capabilities and surface gaps; we cannot achieve our goals if we do not have the right support in place
- Foster mutual trust; teams that trust each other are way more effective than ones that have to do everything with contracts, negotiation, and politics
- Write in plain english and with extreme clarity
- Encourage initiative; execute-and-communicate over ask-and-wait
You’re exceeding expectations when your org is operating like a finely-tuned machine, even when you’re not there.
Capacity building is strengthening the skills, abilities, and resources that our organization and its members need to achieve our shared goals.
You’re expected to:
- Improve the overall well-being and functioning of your team.
- Collaborate with partners well, with an eye toward leveraging the expertise of other teams to bolster your team's capacity and drive success
- Identify an area where you think our org or our company needs to improve. Then create a plan, execute it, and make an impact.