How to own your career growth and become a powerful product leader | Deb Liu, Ancestry (ex-Facebook, PayPal)

1. Master Communication Skills

Prioritize developing strong communication skills, both written and verbal, as it is the core job of a PM and a powerful advantage for career advancement. Being able to speak intelligently on the spot, even without preparation, is a ‘rocket fuel’ skill for senior executives.

2. PM Your Own Career

Apply product management principles to your career by setting clear goals, creating a roadmap (e.g., two-year, five-year vision), and defining metrics for success. This intentional approach helps evaluate opportunities and ensures you’re making progress towards your desired career path, rather than drifting.

3. Cultivate a Growth Mindset

Continuously seek to grow, listen to feedback, and actively work on shoring up weaknesses, not just leveraging strengths. The most successful professionals are hungry, ambitious, and willing to do what it takes to learn and develop new skills.

4. Join a Mentoring Circle

Form or join a coaching or mentoring circle with peers to gain diverse perspectives, brainstorm challenges, and identify blind spots in your career or work. These groups provide a safe space for feedback and support, asking hard questions you might overlook yourself.

5. Address Systemic Process Issues

When teams struggle to collaborate, look beyond individual personalities and examine underlying systemic process or cultural problems. Often, people are pitted against each other by flawed systems, and fixing these structures is more effective than blaming individuals.

6. Practice Speaking Up

If you’re introverted or uncomfortable speaking in groups, treat it as a learnable skill by actively practicing (e.g., joining Toastmasters, using tally marks in meetings). The more you participate, the less pressure each individual comment carries, making it less fraught.

7. Don’t Devalue Your Ideas

Avoid using self-deprecating phrases like ‘I don’t want to bother you’ or ‘I’m sorry to waste your time’ when communicating your ideas. Present your thoughts with confidence and conviction, recognizing the value you bring to the conversation.

8. Be Intentional in Meetings

Before entering any meeting, take a few seconds to decide what you want to achieve and how you will contribute. Show up fully present and engaged, or consider not attending if you cannot be 110% there, to avoid being a ‘free rider.’

9. Incubate Products Small

When incubating a new product or initiative, start with a small, scrappy team rather than immediately allocating vast resources. This approach helps avoid creating a large target, allows for seeking product-market fit, and makes failure less painful if it doesn’t pan out.

10. Amplify User Success Stories

Internally share compelling stories of how your product changes users’ lives or helps them build businesses. These anecdotes are powerful for gaining internal buy-in and shifting perspectives, even when data might not yet fully support a project.

11. Fund Critical Projects Fully

For large, integrated projects, ensure they are fully funded and resourced to be completed quickly. Elongating such projects due to insufficient support can create hostility and misunderstandings between teams, leading to prolonged development times.

12. Prioritize Instincts in Hiring

When hiring, value a candidate’s instincts, passion, and learning mindset over strict adherence to experience or credentials. Some of the most successful PMs had little prior experience but possessed a strong product orientation and eagerness to learn.

13. Diversify Hiring Practices

To build a more diverse product team, remove unnecessary requirements like a computer science degree or technical interviews, and actively seek candidates from broad backgrounds. Ensure diverse representation on interview panels to increase the likelihood of diverse candidates accepting offers.