How I define north star for my career as a Product Manager

We all have different measures of success in our lives. Some of us use money as their yardstick; others are driven by status, defined in terms of job title, perks, or the number of likes/followers on social media. For a long time, I grappled with this question of how to measure success in my professional life…to know that it’s all building towards a big picture that I can look back and be proud of. So a few years ago, I took a few days off from my job to reflect and define the north star for my professional journey that can help me create a thinking framework to have a rich and fulfilling career.

Here’s the distilled version of what I came up with and how I now think about my professional journey:

“Product management is an art — a delicate mix of fine and performing art; and as a product manager, I consider myself an artist. What an artist craves most is audience — to be able to express myself and reach out to a wide audience via my creations. Therefore, the only measure of my success is the number of people I reach — directly or indirectly — via the products I build. All other career decisions —job title, money, promotion, being a people manager vs an individual contributor, working for small vs big company, or the decision of starting my own venture — are merely byproduct of me trying to reach out to larger and larger audience. As long as I am aligning my efforts towards this singular direction, all other details will take care of themselves.

Over the last 15 years of my professional journey, I have built products that have reached millions of people around the world. Therefore my north star is to build something once in my life that reaches a billion people. If I can do that, then that’ll be something I can look back and be proud of.”

Image Courtsey: Mick Haupt on Unsplash