Being promoted isn’t always what you want, and I can explain why.

I’ve been working as a product manager for a while now, and had a bunch of different roles with varying titles, including being the CEO of a business for around 6 years. In the product realm, I’ve been an executive of product, a product manager, and a junior level, but in all those roles, my interests have remained the same.

To work with designers
To work with engineers.
To talk to customers.
To work out what they need.
And to build stuff for them they get excited about.

In my more senior product roles, my focus would naturally shift to developing the careers of other product managers, and trying to improve general team performance. And while this has been incredibly rewarding, it is not where I have the most fun.

Being good at something, is not the same as wanting to do it for a living.

I’m really good at growing tomatoes, but it doesn’t mean I want to be a tomato farmer.

It comes down to this

I like being in the arena - building stuff and measuring if it works.

If I imagine my life 10 years from now, I want to keep doing what I’m doing right now. If I can do that, I’ll be a very happy person.

Where we get it all wrong

Warren Buffet’s father imparted a simple lesson to him as a child.

“You can either live your life by an internal scorecard, or an external scorecard.”

Buffet believes this is why he has been successful over such a long period of time. He hasn’t worried about what others were doing, or how others see his strategies and investment choices. He is often cited as saying “Getting rich is easy, but no one wants to get rich slow.”

When the .com boom happened in the 90's, Buffet decided to keep to his own lane, value investing in companies he understood, at the vocal criticism of his peers, which appeared to be of little concern to the boy from Omaha. He continued doing what he believed in, which lead him to a fortune of $84.9B. Internal or external scorecard, that’s one hell-of-a score.

When we make make decisions about our life from a place of how others see us and judge us, we only hurt ourselves. We need to find that voice inside that tells us what we really like to do, and then unlock the conviction to do it — no matter what others think.

Living by an internal scorecard means the choices we make reflect how we really want to live, and what choices matter to us. We score the success of our lives based on us — not what we think the world demands of us, or it’s expectations of success.

The envy of product managers

When I’ve talked to product people over the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of envy when it comes to senior sounding roles, especially when they sit just outside of someones reach. I think titles that are a proxy for personal value are the culprit here. Saying someone is junior, for instance, is less a reflection of capability, and more a justification of salary bands, to keep compensation nice and neat.

I have met senior product people who know very little, and associate PMs who know vastly more about product than I will ever know. I interviewed for a product role at Google last year, and during the process, it became clear that even their APMs (Associate Product Managers) where dealing with the kinds of problems that most VP’s of products I knew had very little experience with. The stakes are so much higher there, so does it really matter what title they have when it comes to assessing their capabilities?

Titles, and which companies apply them, vary so much that their application is mostly unhelpful when trying to use them as a way to validate just how awesome you really are at being a product manager. So stop worrying about your title so much. When you go for your next role, it won’t hold you back. I promise.

Some people I’ve spoken with, when they see someone in a more senior role who knows (they think) less than them, feel insulted, and obsess about a kind of external validation. It becomes the compass of their career, and can make them hate a job they used to love. The only way to feel validated, is to be given the crown. But crowns are never what they seem.

These days, as long as I’m doing work I love to do — I’m not fussed by what a company wants to call me, or if I get to call all the shots. If I liked what I’m doing, I’d be fine being called whatever. But this was not always the case.

Earlier in my career I was much more ambitious. I wanted to move up the ranks, and mostly because that was happening, I wanted to keep it going. I found I was often the youngest person in a particular role, which made me feel like I was going places, and so I focused on upward growth. But as time went along — this feeling just started to vanish. Maybe this is just getting older, or maybe I’ve simply grown a little more perspective about what I think is important. Whatever the reason, that sentiment has stayed with me, and given me a lot of calm.

What makes me comfortable with this world view is a beautiful diagram from the book Radical Candor. What I like about this diagram is it breaks apart the idea that everyone wants to climb up in an organisation, and helps people understand this is fine.

Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor, describes these two paths high performers can follow, and both are 100% totally great.

Superstars

Superstars (think shooting stars) are full of ambition and are always looking for the next step up. These individuals are the personality types who drive growth within the team. They will challenge norms, gravitate towards the new, and because of their willingness to adopt more responsibility, will be comfortable moving into more senior positions.

Rockstars

Rockstars have a gradual growth trajectory in your organisation. (Rock as in geology, not as in music). Rocks are solid, always there. They are strong and consistent performers. These people are not looking to move upward to more senior roles. They don’t want additional responsibility. They will continue to do their job with a smile, because they like what they do.

There is a common misconception about rockstars. Some believe they lack ambition and drive. But sometimes people just work out what level they want to play at, and once they find a position they like, they want to keep doing it. This isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of intellectual maturity.

A rockstar will drive excellence and stability in your team. You want as many rockstars as you can find.

It’s not permanent

One important thing to note is that people may move from one to the other. You may find a superstar wishes to change things up and find a place of stability because a family member is very ill. Or perhaps they’ve just had enough of bureaucracy and politics, and they just wish to become an individual contributor for a while.

Everyone has different needs

To build a well rounded team, you need both rockstars and superstars. You need some reliable people to provide stability and quality, and some to drive growth and really fire up the rest of the team.

One of the biggest mistakes managers make when they have a rockstar in their team, is to push them into promotions. You want to avoid this as much as possible. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to grow.

To help rockstars grow, what they want is to deepen their technical expertise. So it’s worth providing opportunities to allow them to do that. They may also respond well to opportunities to share some of their technical expertise with others.

How your culture drives anxiety

When it comes to this fork in the road, you want to be careful about your company culture and what signals it sends. You don’t want a situation where the only path to celebration is through promotion. If the only way to validate if someone is doing a good job is how many times they’ve been promoted, you will end up with the wrong kind of signals to rockstars.

When you only glorify promotions, rockstars will end up pretending they are superstars for fear of being left behind. They’ll feel ashamed staying in a role for so long. So you want to ensure rockstars are valued (and they know they are valued) to ensure this doesn’t happen.

Paying rockstars and superstars accordingly is a good first step, and yet one that few companies really do.

Management isn’t growth

When it comes to superstars, make sure you don’t always promote superstars into management positions. Remember that growth isn’t always about managing people. Some people really don’t like managing staff, it requires a totally different mentality, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to shoot for the stars.

With superstars, make sure to encourage ambition, aiming high, and remove as many barriers as you can so they can grow your business.

My advice to Rockstars…

If you are feeling anxiety about your title, and watching others around you move up into more senior positions, try and let it all go — it’s hard, but find a way there. Don’t worry so much about what your title is. Instead, try and find the kind of team, and the kind of work, you want to do, because you love it.