Treat Your Career Like a Product: How to Drive Your PM Career in 2025
3 Simple Steps to Take Ownership of Your Career Development
Hey,
I’m excited to have a special guest for this episode
. She rocked the product world at Amazon, Spotify, SoundCloud, and more. In this episode, you’ll get golden insights into mastering your product career in 2025.
How are you driving your career growth?
If you find it challenging to answer this question, consider this: if you don’t actively steer your career journey, someone else will. And ultimately, you’re the one who will bear the consequences.
What I’m about to share took me over 8 years to learn. I’d love to save you the time and show you how to tactically start driving your development today. In my post, we’ll cover:
What it means to drive your own development
Why it matters now more than ever
Three tactical ways to start driving your development today by…
1 - Creating space to talk about your growth
2 - Painting an aspirational vision for your career
3 - Building a solid strategy to deliver on your vision
First, what does it mean to drive your own development
Driving your development is a proactive approach to managing your career. It’s a process that transcends the bounds of your company’s performance reviews and establishes a clear career vision beyond your current role.
Tactically, it can involve writing personal OKRs or drafting a career strategy artifact. Like a good product vision, it paints an aspirational picture of your career's long-term future.
It brings me back to a turning point in my career. One in which I shifted dramatically from a passive (*waits for title change*) to an active (*proposes title change*) career management strategy.
Back when I was a PM, I found myself wanting —and expecting—to get promoted. I had naively assumed that simply doing my job well would be enough to secure the promotion I felt I deserved (Spoiler alert: I couldn’t have been more wrong)
Until that point, I had enthusiastic managers shepard me through promotion cycles. They let me know they were putting me up for promotion. It felt wonderful. But as a result, I was late to becoming a self advocate.
It wasn’t until I came across a different management style—one that required me to make my own case for a promotion– where I really took the wheel of driving my own development.
I naturally thought I was being considered for a promotion - without a single conversation with my manager - and came to find that I was far from it. While the experience knocked me off my feet, it highlighted just how behind I was.
At the time, it was a painful wake-up call.
But looking back, it was an important growth moment.
It allowed me to shift from a reactive stance—waiting for my manager or company to decide my future—to a proactive one where I took ownership of my career.
And in the years that followed, as I inevitably cycled through different managers, that stance became crucial. It gave me the confidence to take charge regardless of who was managing me or what the business needed at any given moment.
As a coach, I’ve seen PMs of all levels hit that moment at different points in their career.
It’s a humbling moment. But it’s a teaching moment.
I’ve found that helping PMs adopt a proactive mindset has a profound impact in the short term. It also prepares them for a lifetime of career ownership.
The best PMs and employees practice self-advocacy early and often.
Why This Matters Now More Than Ever
I have two hypotheses on why this is more timely than ever before.
Product Managers Are Leaving the Field: The ambiguity of the PM role—where clear impact and deliverables can often feel vague—makes it easy for talented PMs to burn out. Taking ownership of your progression is a way to combat the hesitation many product people feel these days.
Reorgs Never Stop: While last year's massive tech turnover may have cooled, consistent reorgs remain constant. Arming yourself with tools to stay steady during change is key.
Now, let’s dive into the tools that can help you take control of your career.
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Step One: Create space to talk about your growth
The best way to shift into a proactive career mindset is to flip the script: give your manager something to react to instead of waiting for them to lead the conversation about your growth.
1) Have a kickoff conversation
While it might feel a bit awkward at first, think of it as lightening their load and frame it that way.
For example, I often coach PMs to use language like:
"I know we just wrapped up end-of-year reviews, but I want to take a more ongoing approach to my career development to gauge my progress throughout the year better. How would you feel about scheduling regular check-ins every [X weeks/months]?"
Use this to discuss a plan for career conversations independent from the company’s timelines. Be sure to separate career conversations from work conversations. For example, don’t leave 15 minutes of your weekly 1:1 to discuss your career. Schedule a separate time.
2) Align on a cadence
Pick a cadence that goes beyond your company’s usual review cycles. Most companies rely heavily on annual reviews, but tying your growth solely to those moments can be shortsighted.
Since these will run parallel to work meetings, find a mutual cadence that feels feasible. I’m a fan of the quarterly rhythm.
3) Set clear expectations on both sides
As you step into self-advocacy, take ownership of the process but allow your manager to co-create it. As you initiate these conversations, think about how you’d like this to look and express that explicitly to your manager.
For example:
"As we begin regular career conversations, I want to establish expectations. I hope to drive the process and give you pre-reading before every session we have.”
Step Two: Paint an aspirational vision for your career
I like to encourage clients to think about their career plan like a product.
And within that, I encourage them to start with a vision.
From there, you can detail the strategy, just like you do for product work.
1) Start with a Vision
Like a great product vision, think about the world you want to create for yourself…in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years. What will be true? What will not be true? What is your idyllic career state?
I’ve heard:
I want to be a CPO or Founder.
I want to be working part-time so I can balance my home & work life.
I don’t even know if I want to be in the product anymore.
I want to be an established thought leader in X industry.
Labeling the future in any level of detail is helpful, whether it's crystal clear or completely open-ended. If you’re feeling unsure, this is a great opportunity to dig in and talk about it with your manager or coach.
2) Take stock of your values
Be sure to take stock of the values you want to live by, the values that shape the type of work you want to do, and especially the work you want to avoid.
I’ve heard:
I want to be working on something mission-driven.
I want to build software that feels net-positive for the world.
I want to give back to my community.
I want to be intellectually challenged every day.
While having perfect value alignment isn’t realistic, having a north star of what good looks like is a grounding tool.
3) Check in with your motivators
Finally, I ask clients to consider what incentivizes them. This is highly personal and fluctuates based on their life stage, so honor that dynamism.
Think beyond titles and raises. What else would help you feel valued or grow? Rank your priorities and consider other rewards that would feel additive to your career progression.
I’ve heard:
Base salary is more important to me than equity vs. equity is more important to me than base salary.
L&D budget for coaching & conferences
Vacation time and/or more flexibility to work remote
Higher visibility projects
As you gain clarity on a vision, values, and motivators, you’ll be able to craft a compelling strategy more easily.
Step Three: Build a Solid Strategy To Deliver on Your Vision
Once you have a bigger picture defined, you can create tactical goals to get there. It takes the hand-wavy dreams and helps connect them back to the here and now.
1) Take stock of your performance
I’m a big believer that gap analysis shouldn’t happen once a year. It’s something to be calibrated and reviewed often. Even the most senior PMs can be out of touch with how they measure up.
Start by taking stock of your performance. Where are you excelling? Where are the gaps?
Decide on a plan for reevaluating these gaps throughout the year.
I love using leveling guides (if your company has them) or job descriptions to benchmark your progress. You'll earn bonus points for creating a plan to close those gaps.
For example, if you’re an L6 and the next step is an L7, draw a side-by-side comparison of how the roles evolve and how you meet the expectations of the next level.
For PMs at smaller companies without these resources, I help them hack together leveling sourced from JDs in the market. Bonus: It’s also a way to help the companies introduce leveling.
2) Build a feedback habit
I’m a big believer that feedback should happen early and often.
So, consider how you’ll collect regular feedback—not just from your manager but also from peers and cross-functional partners.
For example, send a Slack/email to coworkers to gather feedback. You can ask questions like:
“I’m working on my storytelling skills. I'm curious how that presentation landed for you. What worked? Where could I have been better?”
Whatever you do, keep it lightweight and real-time. You'll likely lose valuable feedback if you wait days or weeks afterward.
3) Pick a goal-setting structure
Finally, once you’ve done some groundwork, decide on a goal-setting structure that works best for you.
OKRs are great because they’re actionable and ubiquitous. The more specific, the better, so you can track your progress. I’ve seen these deployed in many ways.
Don’t get bogged down in doing it how the company does it. Instead, focus on what feels easy for you and your manager to engage in.
Some things I’ve seen work well:
Yearly Objective setting with quarterly KRs that change.
Quarterly OKRs
DISCLAIMER FOR THE PM WITH A NEW MANAGER: When starting with a new manager, avoid sending them all your performance reviews. Instead, please give them a one-pager to help them onboard as your manager. You’ll win lots of brownie points, I promise.
You’ll likely notice the many parallels with this process and how we build products.
I believe PMs have an unfair advantage because vision, strategy, and incrementality are in our bones. It’s rarely the case that a PM doesn’t know how to do all of this; rather, they haven’t made the time for it.
I do this today even as a Product Coach. I use yearly OKRs and have a monthly goal-writing practice.
And I’m more grounded and better off for it.
What goal-setting practices do you have? I’d love to add more to my repertoire!
Meet Jori Bell: A Product Coach
Jori Bell is a seasoned product leader & coach with extensive experience launching & scaling 0-1 products to millions at companies including Audible, Spotify, SoundCloud, Rolling Stone, and AOL. Jori works with product leads and their teams to deliver high-impact products using the product operating model. Jori hosts monthly breakfasts for Product Leaders, writes Product Therapy, and supports fellow coaches through her community, Coaching Corner.
Jori is a Product Coach based in NYC. She writes Product Therapy, hosts Product Leadership Breakfasts, and coaches Product Leads and their teams. You can contact her here.
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