Here’s the data on how Product Managers evaluate new jobs
I’ve been curious about how product managers weigh various factors in selecting new jobs. I have written about the various criteria that I’ve heard people using to make these decisions. These conversations left me yearning for a more quantitative understanding around relative rankings. So I fielded a survey that can be found here.
The criteria I asked about in the survey were:
- Mission and vision of the new company or product: Do I believe in the mission of the company or product (why does the product exist?) and whether this aligns with my personal values? Am I inspired by the vision and where the company or product is going?
- Compensation and benefits: self-explanatory
- Growth opportunities: Is there a clear line of sight to increasing responsibilities, impact and possibly career growth in terms of promotions etc.?
- Learning opportunities: Will this role will allow me to learn a new (in-demand) skill?
- Title: Is the title of the role is commensurate with my experience and expectations, and confers social capital?
- Manager: What is my managers’ reputation? Is he/she someone I can see myself getting along with, learning from, being inspired by?
- Team culture: Can I see myself fitting into the culture of the team. As a side-note: to me team culture is not just about fun events but also defined by things like how the team is structured (e.g. flat vs. layered), how the talent system works (in terms of performance management, career paths etc.), how the team works (planning etc.), how the team interacts with others etc. (this is the framework from Primed to Perform, by Neel Doshi)
- Lifestyle factors (commute, work-life balance etc.): I’ve met a bunch of people that are changing jobs for a better commute, or deciding between like roles based on these kinds of lifestyle factors
- Visibility to senior leadership: Is the domain or product something that matters to leadership, and how much visibility the individual will get in that role?
Why did I do this? Simple — I wanted to understand how best to recruit and retain the best PMs. Obviously, anything from a survey will be an average — and might not apply to the specific person you’re trying to recruit or retain, but this analysis should at least provide a starting point for the conversation. In addition, the usual caveats with surveys apply (what people say might be different from what they actually do etc.)
So, without further ado — here are the insights from the survey:
Obviously, this is not massively surprising. There seem to be two tiers of role evaluation criteria being used on average:
- First tier: manager and growth opportunities; which resonate with me personally. The direct manager is the most important relationship you have at work and can make or break the experience. Growth opportunities scoring highly is also self-explanatory — taps into the innate desire (especially amongst Type-A PMs) to grow and always have forward momentum.
- Second tier of factors: lifestyle factors, comp and learning opportunities: In the survey , Lifestyle factors included things like work-life balance, commute etc. This combined with Compensation are the inherent characteristics of any job and are likely going to pop for any discipline.
If you slice this data slightly differently — what did most people say was their top criteria (remember — the above chart is a distribution of total points allocated)?
The ranking essentially stays the same. There is more of a distinction, with “Manager” and “Growth Opportunities” swapping places, but not by much; same for the tier 2 factors.
If you slice it along number of years of experience — a few interesting insights emerge
- How much people weigh learning opportunities is inversely related to years of experience (junior people weigh it more..).
- Junior folks aren’t as worried about visibility to senior leadership
- Title is more important at the mid-level, where there might be some ambiguous title and likely the most title growth.
This might get controversial, but here is the data split along gender lines; I’m sure there are other studies that more scientifically look at this — so don’t want to draw any conclusions.
- Women weigh Manager and Growth Opportunities more than men
- Men weigh Lifestyle Factors and Compensation more than women
Some other interesting free-form responses to the question in terms of additional criteria that PMs use to evaluate new opportunities.
- Ability to innovate
- Employee engagement
- Company reputation
- Ability to help drive business and product strategy
On the last one, Reza Shirazi has an interesting take on this topic (thanks Rajesh Nerliker for making the connection). Autonomy would have been a good criteria to include in the survey.
All views, opinions and statements are my own
