Choosing a job
Framework to choose between different job opportunities
I often meet with Product Managers who are trying to choose between multiple job options. As I give them advice on identifying which opportunity is the best fit for them, I can’t help but reflect on how I have made job decisions throughout my career. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self what I have learned. So here I am, writing it out in the hopes that it will be helpful to some of you!
It’s worth noting that choosing a job when you are early in your career is quite different from choosing a job when you’re more senior. When you first start out, people are more willing to take on a newly minted grad who is smart and motivated and train that person. In some ways, this gives you access to a wider range of opportunities. As you get more senior, even though some companies are still following “generalist” PM models, such as Meta, Google, Square, etc., people start to look for candidates with more relevant experience. Although possible, it’s harder to make a big move across industries or functions at this point without taking a step back to rebuild your credibility. Additionally, when you reach leadership level, recruiting is done through a separate track, and it often involves a lot more conversations and relationship building. For the purposes of this article, I want to focus on choosing a job at the early to mid-career stage, when you still have flexibility to choose from a wider range of opportunities.
Finding what works
As I’m sure you have, I’ve heard a lot of job-seeking advice from different people.
“Choose a manager,” one said. “Choose someone who is interested in helping you grow.” “Choose a company,” a professor at my MBA program once told me. “Choose a company with a product you like and do a great job there. You can transfer to the team or specific position you like best later.” “Choose an industry,” another respectable Product Lead said. “It’s like wave surfing. Choose an up-and-coming area so that if it doesn’t work out at your current company, you can always find the next wave to ride.”
I’ve tested many of these pieces of advice. Once, I chose a manager whom I admired and who cared a lot about helping me grow. I had a great year working for him, until he moved to a new job, and the manager who replaced him wasn’t that great. I realized then that the “Choose a manager” advice might work very well in other industries, where people tend to stay for a long time at a good company, but not in tech. In Silicon Valley, people move around so often that “Choose a manager” is no longer a good piece of advice. Of course, you need to do very careful due diligence to avoid bad managers, but you don’t want to choose a job just because you like the current manager.
On the other hand, “Choose a company with a product you love” is a reasonable strategy. If for some reason you don’t like your current team, it’s easier to explore an internal transfer to another role that’s a better fit for you. Sometimes, people can even move functions (e.g., moving from Sales to Marketing to Product Management.) If you’re doing great work, people will recognize that and want to support you. Additionally, since you’re now within a company, you have a lot more resources and insights to help you prepare for your ideal job. In my case, I had chosen Google as the company I wanted to join because I heard that product management at Google was well respected, and I wanted to learn best practices from Google Product Leaders. This turned out to be a great career choice.
I loved my job at Google. However, when my learning hit a plateau, I set out to choose my next role. This time, I chose the self-driving Industry, following the advice to “Choose an industry”. In 2018, the self-driving Industry was at its peak. I was also fascinated by the cutting-edge machine learning techniques in the self-driving space. I took a chance and went to Waymo, which attracted some of the best talents at Google. I learned more at Waymo than I did in all of my previous jobs combined. However, it turned out that the self-driving Industry was not scaling as fast as people had predicted. This led me to find the next industry!
Once again, I followed the instruction to "Choose an industry", but added “and a team” to the end. I wanted to work in a rising industry, and on a team that I enjoyed. Instagram Ads has given me the opportunity to work at the intersection of two big areas: social media and ads. Working in defining the ads experience to help consumers on Instagram find the products they love has given me the opportunity to stay on top of consumer trends. It has also allowed me to stay close to the business side, with clear revenue impact. I made sure to choose a team with a track record of achieving their goals, a good culture, and a group of strong leaders. I love my manager, but I don’t want to be in a bad position if they choose to leave. Meanwhile, working in a growing industry increases the chance that my product sees a lot of growth. Additionally, if I decide to move, there are plenty of opportunities in the industry for which I have relevant experience.
How do I know when it’s time to look for a new job?
Choosing a job is also about knowing the right time to move on from your current role, industry, or company. You have probably heard a lot of conflicting advice about this, so here are a few takeaways from my own experience.
Set a clear goal. One of my managers once cautioned me, “Be very intentional about what you get out of your job.” Many of us in tech and Product management have the privilege of having choices. However, life also flies by quickly, and delaying a decision is a decision in itself. Always have a clear goal about what you want to get out of your job. Maybe you want to learn the craft of product management, gain experience in consumer products, or learn how to build and scale teams. Whatever your goal, remember to check back in with yourself once in a while about how it’s going. If you find that you’re no longer on target, that may be a sign that it’s time to move on.
Evaluate your current job. It’s often easier to decide when things are really good (deciding you want to stay), or things are really bad (deciding you want to leave). The hardest time is when things are in the middle. There’s enough to learn that you have a reason to stay, but there are enough not-so-good aspects that you start to wonder whether it’s worth it. In this case, I set out to answer the question, “From a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, how happy am I with my job this week?” I then track my answers for about 10 weeks. If I see too many scores that are below 8, I know that it’s time to think about the next opportunity. The rule of thumb though is to evaluate regularly and make a conscious decision to stay or move on. It’s about living intentionally, rather than just letting days go by without making a decision.
Can issues be addressed? You might be thinking, “If you move every time you’re not happy, how will you develop resilience?” I love learning. In fact, I love it when things get tough, and I need to work hard to help pull the team through challenging times. During these times, my happiness score is often high, because I feel that I’m learning a lot. On the other hand, my scores are often low when I have a team with a bad culture, or without much room to learn. In these situations, I will give myself a timetable and put all my efforts into fixing the situation. As Product Leads, we often have a lot of agencies and influence in the organization. At the same time, we must acknowledge that sometimes, the environment can be bigger than we are, and we don’t have control of everything. Giving myself a deadline for fixing the situation often makes me feel good that I have done all that I can, and if it doesn’t work out, I’m happy to move on.
Evaluating opportunities
So, I’ve decided it’s time to leave, picked a new industry, and had a few job offers. Now comes the big decision: choosing which job to accept. This can be daunting. How did I evaluate these opportunities? I used the 3-step framework below:
Start with a decision-making scorecard
Do a lot of homework
Tap into the extended mind
First, as a PM, I often start with a decision-making scorecard. What are the different criteria? How much weight should I give to each? What are the grades for different answers? This mechanism is familiar to many Product Managers. What is often difficult is to answer in a way that’s honest and true to yourself and your goals. This is where having an end vision for your career in mind, along with an understanding of what matters to you both inside and outside of work, is important. This can require a lot of self-reflection.
Second, do a lot of homework. You cannot only rely on companies and teams to provide you with all the information you want. Know what is important to you and reach out to people in your network to help get context. Be concrete in your research, rather than abstract.
In my case, since I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old, and I don’t want to miss out on their childhoods, work-life balance is important to me. At the same time, work-life balance is a very abstract concept that is very much dependent on each person. I’m happy to pour myself non-stop into work from 9 to 5, then take a break to take care of my family until 10pm. I’m happy to then log in for another two hours or so occasionally if needed. I don’t want to work weekends, except for a few hours on Sunday night, when I plan for my week. When I had a few job opportunities that made me worry about working off-hours, I reached out to LinkedIn connections, many of whom I didn’t know very well. They were kind enough to meet with me for a few minutes to give me an inside look at what my day-to-day might be like. I pointedly asked them to describe their work schedules to me, and I was able to cut out a few companies that required more work than I wanted to do. They were good options—it just wasn’t the right time in my life for me to dedicate that much time to work.
Similarly, it’s important for me to work with a manager who can help me develop my career. Therefore, I often asked recruiters to help me connect with people who worked with my potential managers. I found that most people will be very honest if you ask them concrete questions. For example, instead of asking “Are they good managers?”, I often ask: “How did they show care to the team?” or “Can you give me an example in which they influenced the team to pivot the strategy?”, or “How did they help you become a better PM?”.
The framework will not yield good results unless you give it great inputs. Doing homework takes a lot of time. The job search process can be draining. At the same time, if you treat it as an opportunity to learn and meet new people, you can have a lot of fun going through the process.
Last, I tapped into the extended mind for clarity. During my last career transition, after hours staring at my decision-making scorecard, I still wasn’t confident that I would reach the right decision. Ken Norton, a well-respected PM leader who is now a PM coach, helped me with a thought exercise that gave me clarity. We first eliminated options that were clearly not winning candidates. Soon enough, we were left with two opportunities to choose from. For this article, let’s call these Opportunity A and Opportunity B. Ken asked me to close my eyes and imagine the following:
If I took job A, what would be the best-case scenario in 12-18 months?
If I took job B, what would be the best-case scenario in 12-18 months?
If I took job A, what would be the worst-case scenario in 12-18 months?
If I took job B, what would be the worst-case scenario in 12-18 months?
If I took job A, and the worst-case scenario happened, what would I regret the most?
If I took job B, and the worst-case scenario happened, what would I regret the most?
For each question, try to make it as real as possible by imagining I was really in the job. Think about the environment I was in, the people, the surroundings, the product, etc. Try to tap into emotions and feelings when thinking about the best and worst possible outcomes. The exercise helped amplify my gut feeling and gave me strong confidence in my choice.
My career journey hasn’t been a straight line, and I’ve had to do a lot of trial and error to find the best strategy for choosing a job. However, it paid off in the end. Working at Instagram Ads is one of my favorite jobs so far. I feel great about my career growth and career options in the future. I love my team, my manager, and the extended Instagram culture, and I can’t wait to see where things go from here.
The process of choosing a job as a PM takes a lot of time and effort. However, by being intentional about your decisions and planning ahead, you will find that it’s well worth it.
I hope this information is useful to you as you embark on your journey. Let me know what you think, and feel free to share the lessons you have learned along the way!