The Three Performance Bars

The lesson I always share with junior folks is the three different sets of expectations for their performance: their own, the company’s, and the best.

There are three relevant moments I remember clearly from my first two years as a PM. In one, my skip-level (a director) presented my slides on-the-fly better than I did with hours of practice and familiarity. In another, my direct manager (also a director) told a VP something I understood easily in hindsight and wondered why I couldn’t have said the same words myself. In the third, I received a grade of “exceeds expectations” despite turning in what felt like the worst performance of my life.

Each moment taught me something about expectations.

First, at a place like Google, in a role like APM, the company’s expectations for you are almost certainly lower than your own. APMs come from top universities and have wider-ranging talents than their peers, but they’re asked to work with folks who mould’ve been APMs 20 years ago and then added 20 years of experience on top! They’re used to being the best of the best, and they arrive to find they’re struggling with relative basics. Some let their own expectations drive a feeling of failure that isn’t justified.

(Note I’m using APM as a shorthand for someone new to the PM role with less than five years of experience in industry.)

Second, any of those might’ve-been-an-APM-plus-20-years’-experience can easily offer insightful coaching for those new folks across the entire range of PM skills. When constructive feedback is constant, people confuse the feedback with the expectations. But they’re not! When an L7 manages an L3 operating at L4, the L7 is quite capable of pushing them to operate more like an L5. None of this changes that they’re already at the top of their level: in other words, “killing it”.

There’s nothing like mismatched expectations to cause surprises and hurt feelings, so I always try to communicate the differences between the performance you want to reach, the company needs you to reach, and your manager is going to help you reach.