Why did I write this?

Career transitions can be difficult. In my case, going through the rotation process, from APM1 to APM2, was one of the more daunting parts of the APM program. In my opinion, this is the case because:

APMs are fairly ambitious (perhaps the understatement of the century)
APMs are in a unique position to choose their next role with an overwhelming amount of information
Given (1) and (2), there is a strong desire to make a near ‘perfect’ decision that will maximize your returns in the near and long term, however you personally think of ‘returns’ (we’ll get to that later)

At the very least, 1–3 were the factors that made the process difficult for me. So the goal of this document is to refine my experience into three takeaways that can apply to any major career transition you might be going through.

Hopefully you can circumvent the feeling of not knowing where to start, feeling like you’re not doing this process the ‘right’ way (spoiler: there is no right way — insofar as I can tell), and any decision paralysis you might feel towards the end.

The Tips

1. Understand what’s important to you

What you want out of your next role is really personal, so it’s worth doing some introspection to figure out what it is that matters to you. I think it’s useful to think beyond simple metrics, and look at things that might seem a little more qualitative — for me, as an associate product manager at Google, this looked like the following:

Working on a product space I’m excited about / interested in
Having a good manager / strong mentorship
Working on a new / established product
Working on a bigger / smaller team
Scope of impact is high level strategy / execution / both
Working on a B2B / B2C / Internal tool / developer product
Lots of internal partners vs lots of external partners
Working on a project that is strategically important to Google

While some of these are pretty quantitative, others aren’t. I also dug deep to understand my longer term goals, and how the role might align with those. For me personally, these include starting my own business (again) in the future, and so working with successful ex-founders from whom I could learn / work directly, as well as understanding monetization of a product, had outsized importance — but those are pretty random qualities that I don’t think most folks would consider.

I’d encourage you to think of what those odd / unique factors are for you, and try to measure them. But the process is not linear, and to be honest I probably came up with those after talking to teams, not before — I needed to understand what the universe of options was before I could really build out my list of criteria, and that’s ok too.

2. Collect some information

I think it’s tempting to try to collect all the data you possibly can about a new role or team, so I’ll share the salient advice I got — try to get a feel for when you would start to get diminishing returns on conversations with team members. For me, after talking to a team lead twice, 1–2 of their reports, and 1–2 cross-functional team members I might work with, I felt like I hit that wall — more conversations with those people would be nice, but I felt like I had 80–90% of the information I needed. And not all of that information was explicit — some of it was understanding the role, the problems and opportunities the team was facing, and what my work might look like.

But the more important part for me was whether I felt like they’d passed the airport test for me, and whether my potential manager’s reports felt like their manager invested time in them — a question for which a direct answer isn’t actually the most telling. Believe it or not, most folks won’t tell a prospective teammate that their manager has no time for them (in fact, I almost never heard that). You might have to resort to some indirect methods (like ‘creeping’ on potential managers calendars and seeing how much time they made for their reports if you happen to be at the same company), in addition to talking to reports themselves, to get this information.

3. Just Decide (& know that you can’t account for everything)

You can do all the right things (understand what you want, collect all the data) and still feel decision paralysis at the end of the process. I know I certainly did — in my case, in the form of some concerns I had about what was otherwise my top choice (and where I ended up ultimately going). When you feel like you’re at the point of making a decision, and just have decision paralysis holding you back, what helped me was:

All else being equal, looking at which team I think I would enjoy more / have more fun on. It wasn’t something I weighed strongly earlier on, but if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, you’ll probably be doing a worse job (or at least that’s what I thought), and so running my final decision through this filter felt quite helpful.
Run through your concerns explicitly and try to address them. In my case, I was able to, which made me comfortable that I was making the right decision for myself. I actually did this with my management coach, which I found particularly helpful, but it would work as a solo exercise or with any close friend or mentor.
Be comfortable with going with your instincts at the end — you cannot possibly make the perfect decision, information is always imperfect, life is dynamic, and there is too much you don’t know at this stage. Make the best choice you can, and don’t hold yourself to making the perfect decision. If you’re a PM specifically, then I think you’ll find that this is something we have to do constantly as PMs — we never have enough data, and are constantly looked at to make big and important decisions. Trusting your own synthesis of the data and the instincts you derive from them are, in my mind, a key PM skill, and one you should use to push you through making the final call on your move, should you feel like you need to. And even if you’re not a PM, the indescribable heuristic pattern matching that we call ‘instinct’ can be powerful, don’t ignore it just because you can’t succinctly describe it!

A photo of the northern lights from an APM trip to Alaska!

Thanks for making it all the way to the through the article, I’d love to know if you found it helpful, please let me know 👇🙏

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