Expectations

1. Your most important expectation is to drive results. The purpose of product management is to bring a product vision to life. Everything we do is in service of that. Since we can't measure the vision itself, we create proxy goals and measure progress against them. You are expected to:

• Identify a goal metric that maps to real user or business value
• Set a difficult 50/50 target on that metric
• Make strong progress against that target while also driving solid results on non-goal metrics, including qualitative user feedback

Your results can be outstanding even when targets are missed, as long as the goal was important, the target was aggressive, and the non-goal metric results were solid.

2. In order to drive strong results, you must have a plan to do so. This is your strategy expectation. Good strategies are adaptable plans that coordinate actions toward a goal in an uncertain world with competitors whose interests conflict with yours. You're expected to:

• Create plans to achieve your goals, informed by a deep understanding of the situation. This includes knowing what users are saying about your product, how both typical (p50) and extreme (p90, p95) users engage with it, how top-line metrics are trending, and how short and long-term holdout results are moving.
• Provide a continuing stream of options on how to adapt your plans, informed by changes to the situation.
• Help decision makers evaluate the options

Your strategy can be outstanding when, with minimal oversight, you develop plans that connect directly to valuable results, whether realized or supported by strong proof points. Where results haven't landed yet, strong proof points are sufficient for an outstanding rating in the current cycle.

3. You must also enact that plan. This is your execution expectation. Execution is the ability to get things done reliably and fast. You're expected to:

• Track your team's velocity, e.g. 1.6 launches per eng per month
• Track your team's average impact per launch, e.g. 0.04% DAU per launch
• Accelerate velocity by clearing bottlenecks, filling gaps, and leveraging AI
• Improve the consistency with which results land
• Communicate with extreme clarity
• Report progress toward goals every week
• See around corners to identify and mitigate risk early

Your execution can be outstanding when your team ships at high velocity with consistent results, you've removed identifiable constraints on output, and your team's measured velocity has improved relative to baseline.

4. Finally, you are expected to build capacity, which makes strong performance durable. This involves strengthening the skills, systems, and resources your organization needs to achieve its goals durably. Your capacity expectations are to:

• Improve the overall well-being and functioning of your team
• Collaborate with colleagues well, with an eye toward leveraging the expertise of other teams to bolster your team's capacity and drive results
• Assess your team's internal capabilities and surface gaps
• Identify one area where your organization needs to improve, build a plan, and execute it

Your capacity building can be outstanding when you've driven a measurable improvement in team health, cross-functional leverage, or organizational capability, and the change has persisted into the following cycle.