Impact solves all PM career problems

Noah is discussing the core responsibilities of product managers, building on the saying "growth solves all problems."

I think impact solves all PM issues, which is if a team is consistently building things people love and changing the director of the business, everything else is just an input.

We're always looking to see where people moved the needle, especially on the product side, where their fingerprints were, what they can actually point to that they did and are proud of during their time there.

Your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing.

The way to get promoted is to not want it too badly. It is about you have to focus on the impact. Are you working on the right things that will have the right outcome for the business? Because if you are and if you are giving it to your 100%, that will be visible.

I kept coming back to this problem. I'm like, 'Man, how is the world going to deal with this information quality issue of what we get on social media?' Wherever get it. I'm at this company where you can make a difference on this problem, why not go and try some crazy ideas and see if one of them might work?

Community Notes is Twitter/X's crowdsourced fact-checking feature that lets users add context to potentially misleading tweets.

Look at Community Notes for example. If I had stayed running a large consumer PM team, what would I have produced? 16 more pages of OKRs? I don't know, a bunch of documents? I think building Community Notes has had way bigger impact on the world.

Impact is only achievable by looking at a set of variables related to the environment, a set of variables related to your skills.

I think there's one myth that can get in people's ways. The idea that the more people you manage or the larger your scope is, the more impact you have. I definitely do not think that is true.