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Product Management6 min read

Hey, senior PMs: Shipping faster won’t get you promoted

Shipping fast felt great — until margins tanked, and I learned that real product leadership means understanding how features make or lose money.

By Richard Ewing·

The Velocity Trap

In mid-career product management, the primary metric of success is execution velocity: How fast can you get a spec to engineering, through QA, and into production? But as you transition to Senior and Principal roles, this metric becomes a liability.

Feature Economics over Feature Velocity

Executive leadership does not care about your sprint velocity if the features you are shipping hold a negative carry. A Senior PM understands the Feature Bloat Calculus. They know that every line of code added to the system increases the permanent maintenance tax on the organization.

You get promoted by killing bad ideas before they consume engineering capacity. You get promoted by proving the unit economics of a feature before demanding architecture changes. You get promoted by acting like the CEO of your feature set.


Check out the full article on CIO.com.

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.