Job hopping is the best way to improve wage growth, as others said.
I will paraphrase something an old boss said to me, which is that the fact that you're asking about ways to improve puts you heads and shoulders above most people. There's tremendous value in focusing on growth -- personal and professional -- and spending a lot of time introspecting and thinking a lot about how to be a better person, a better team mate, a better leader. You'll get it wrong, you'll mess up, but the act of thinking about it is going to give you some advantages over most people you interact with.
For me personally, I think one of the best skills you can develop is the ability to problem solve. I'm an engineer, so I think about problems through a certain lens, but for PMs, it's equally important. It's not just about how to arrive at a solution, but how to determine whether you're even looking at the right problem. It's something that I thought came naturally to me, but I spend a lot of time running scenarios in my head about how I might solve the real-world problems I see in front of me. For example, if a particular system is slow, I run through scenarios on how to speed it up or decouple certain features to enable concurrency. If customers are dropping off in a funnel, I brainstorm scenarios through which I can proactively alert us that something is going wrong, or perhaps how to add additional telemetry to give us more signal in the noise.
One axiom out there is "bring solutions, not problems," and so constantly practicing the the problem solving is something that has served me very very well. My solutions aren't always the best, but the muscle memory is very ingrained and I can iterate very quickly with people about what possible solutions are, more so than many of my peers.
In a similar vein of this, like, is the problem the right problem to solve? Just because something is a problem doesn't mean it's an _important_ problem. For example, my CEO is asking me to do something that will make us $100,000, and she says it's really important. But our company makes $400 million dollars a year in revenue. Is an additional 100K going to move the needle? Nope, not even a little bit.
So is that the best use of our time? No. That doesn't mean we shouldn't build the feature, but it does mean that we are probably not solving the correct problem. By reframing "doing the thing" as "building a tool to automate the thing," then I can 10x, 25x, 50x the leverage the company has to do these 100K revenue tasks.
I don't always win this argument, but it's a good exercise to go through at any rate.
Anyway, that's some stream of consciousness stuff for you. Hope it helps. Best of luck!
I will paraphrase something an old boss said to me, which is that the fact that you're asking about ways to improve puts you heads and shoulders above most people. There's tremendous value in focusing on growth -- personal and professional -- and spending a lot of time introspecting and thinking a lot about how to be a better person, a better team mate, a better leader. You'll get it wrong, you'll mess up, but the act of thinking about it is going to give you some advantages over most people you interact with.
For me personally, I think one of the best skills you can develop is the ability to problem solve. I'm an engineer, so I think about problems through a certain lens, but for PMs, it's equally important. It's not just about how to arrive at a solution, but how to determine whether you're even looking at the right problem. It's something that I thought came naturally to me, but I spend a lot of time running scenarios in my head about how I might solve the real-world problems I see in front of me. For example, if a particular system is slow, I run through scenarios on how to speed it up or decouple certain features to enable concurrency. If customers are dropping off in a funnel, I brainstorm scenarios through which I can proactively alert us that something is going wrong, or perhaps how to add additional telemetry to give us more signal in the noise.
One axiom out there is "bring solutions, not problems," and so constantly practicing the the problem solving is something that has served me very very well. My solutions aren't always the best, but the muscle memory is very ingrained and I can iterate very quickly with people about what possible solutions are, more so than many of my peers.
In a similar vein of this, like, is the problem the right problem to solve? Just because something is a problem doesn't mean it's an _important_ problem. For example, my CEO is asking me to do something that will make us $100,000, and she says it's really important. But our company makes $400 million dollars a year in revenue. Is an additional 100K going to move the needle? Nope, not even a little bit.
So is that the best use of our time? No. That doesn't mean we shouldn't build the feature, but it does mean that we are probably not solving the correct problem. By reframing "doing the thing" as "building a tool to automate the thing," then I can 10x, 25x, 50x the leverage the company has to do these 100K revenue tasks.
I don't always win this argument, but it's a good exercise to go through at any rate.
Anyway, that's some stream of consciousness stuff for you. Hope it helps. Best of luck!