Why "Impact" Is a Better Career Metric Than Promotion
Optimizing your career for promotion produces a specific set of behaviors — most of which make you a worse product leader. Here is what to optimize for instead.
Most people evaluate their career trajectory by one primary signal: am I getting promoted on schedule?
This is an understandable default. Promotion is legible, socially validated, and tied to concrete rewards. It is also, for product leaders in particular, a metric that produces systematically bad incentives.
Let me explain why — and make the case for a different primary metric.
What Promotion-Optimized Behavior Looks Like
When promotion is the primary goal, certain behaviors become rational:
Visibility over substance. Promotions are granted by people who observe your work at a distance. Work that is visible — that surfaces in meetings, produces documents, generates stakeholder praise — is more promotable than work that is substantive but quiet. A PM who ships flashy features that miss on outcomes is often promoted faster than one who does patient, unsexy discovery work that leads to a genuinely better product.
Safe choices over correct ones. Promotion requires being seen as competent by your manager and their manager. Risky bets, even well-reasoned ones, jeopardize this perception when they fail. Promotion-seeking creates preference for predictable, low-variance decisions over high-upside, uncertain ones. This is precisely the wrong incentive for product work.
Internal alignment over external insight. Getting promoted requires navigating the organization well — managing up, building political capital, making sure the right people have positive impressions of you. This internal focus pulls attention away from the external work that actually matters: talking to customers, understanding the market, doing the discovery that produces real product insight.
Short cycles over long investments. Promotions typically evaluate performance over 6-12 month windows. Work that compounds over two or three years — building a team culture, developing a deep understanding of a market segment, making a technical architecture investment — does not show up legibly within the evaluation window. Promotion pressure pushes toward short-cycle work.
None of these behaviors make you a worse person. But they make you a worse product leader. And organizations that systematically reward them end up with product management cultures that produce polished presentations and mediocre products.
What Impact Actually Means
Impact is a more ambiguous concept than promotion, which is both its weakness and its strength.
For a product manager, impact means measurably improving the lives of the users you serve and the position of the business you work for. It is defined externally — by user outcomes and business outcomes — not internally by organizational hierarchy.
Keeping impact as the primary metric produces different behavior:
Choosing hard problems over visible ones. The most impactful work is rarely the most visible. Often it is identifying and solving the problem that is genuinely blocking user success — which may have been deprioritized because it is unsexy, technically complex, or politically inconvenient.
Honest measurement. Impact-focused PMs define success metrics before shipping and measure them honestly after. They are willing to say “this did not work” when a feature fails to move the metric it was designed to move. Promotion-focused PMs sometimes avoid defining measurable success criteria because they protect against accountability.
Investment in boring infrastructure. Many of the highest-leverage product improvements are not features at all — they are system improvements, onboarding redesigns, documentation, and foundation work that makes everything else work better. These are consistently underinvested in promotion-focused cultures.
Longer time horizons. Impact thinking naturally extends beyond the performance review cycle. What kind of product do we want in three years? What infrastructure do we need to build now to get there? What capabilities are we investing in that will not pay off until the next product cycle?
The Career Paradox
Here is the uncomfortable truth that most career advice does not tell you: the people who achieve the most senior, most influential, and most rewarding product leadership roles are almost universally people who genuinely cared about impact and treated career advancement as a byproduct, not a goal.
This is not idealism. It is observable pattern.
Senior product leadership roles require judgment: the ability to make calls in ambiguous situations where neither success nor failure is immediate or obvious. Judgment is built through years of genuine intellectual engagement with hard problems — through the kind of deep thinking and rigorous learning that only happens when you are internally motivated by the problem, not by its career implications.
PMs who have optimized for promotion for a decade often arrive at senior roles without the judgment those roles require. They have the titles, the vocabulary, and the political skills. But they lack the hard-won product wisdom that comes from genuinely trying to understand users, rigorously testing hypotheses, and doing discovery that is actually open-ended rather than performed.
How to Operationalize Impact as a Career Metric
This is not abstract advice. It requires a practical translation.
Define your impact thesis for each role you take. Before joining a company or accepting a promotion, articulate what you believe you can accomplish that will matter. Not just “lead the team” — what specific user problems will be better solved, what metrics will move, what capabilities will exist that do not today? This gives you a compass for the work that you own.
Measure your own outcomes rigorously. Build the habit of tracking what moved as a result of your work. Not what shipped — what changed. Keep this record even if your company’s performance review process does not require it. The calibration is for you, not your manager.
Choose assignments that develop real expertise. A harder assignment that develops deep expertise in a domain — technical, market, operational — is worth more than an easier assignment with a better title. The expertise compounds. The title does not.
Seek environments that reward impact, not just output. This matters more than most people realize. If your organization consistently promotes people who produce impressive-looking output without meaningful outcomes, impact orientation will not be rewarded here and your choices reflect that environment whether you want them to or not. Knowing this helps you make clearer-eyed decisions about where to work.
Career metrics shape behavior. Choose the one that produces the behavior you actually want.