Here’s a guide on How to Coast as Product Manager. As a disclaimer, we’re not promoting it, but if we were to do it, this is how we’d do it. The headlines around “quiet quitting” have been making the media rounds lately. Checked out, burnt out, having a life outside of work, has a new term, quiet quitting. Beach, please! As Silicon Valley tech veterans, we’ve been doing this for ages. It’s known as coasting and the “rest and vest.”
What Is Coasting at Work?
Coasting, quiet quitting, or rest and vesting as a product manager is about doing your work well but not going above and beyond. You are doing the minimal possible amount of work not to get fired. The philosophy is to spend your time and life on what matters and do only the work necessary for a paycheck. Don’t put in extra work to get a promo. There’s a high probability it will be rejected anyway.
We hate the term quiet “quitting” since it vilifies those doing their job perfectly and meeting all their performance goals. Getting a “Meets Expectations” rating on your performance review is now considered quiet quitting 🤷♀️.
Why You Should Coast at Work
Employees have been resting and vesting and coasting for years. Companies like Google and Microsoft are stereotypical places people go to coast. It’s no secret, but millennials and gen Zs are realizing this is a thing. With the pandemic and celebration of “hustle culture,” many employees are burnt out, emotionally drained, exhausted, unmotivated, and even depressed. After being in the workforce for a while, you realize it’s not worth working hard for a company. There are diminishing returns to going “the extra mile.”
As Product Managers, we like to assign metrics to everything. A metric to monitor here is hours worked per dollar earned (HRs/$). Monitoring this metric, you’ll soon realize the dollar per hour does not scale with the extra work you put into the job. There is friction to increase this metric, including performance cycles, egos, budgets, and politics. As HBS mentions, it’s more about bad bosses than bad employees.
Evidence To Support Coasting
We’ve all been there, young and ambitious, giving 120% at companies and working late hours. What do we get in return? A 1% raise that’s less than inflation. A multi-year promise of “we’re working on your promotion, but we have no budget”. In terms of ROI, It’s just not worth it. As a product manager, you need to be mindful of ROIs.
This tweet shows all the work it takes to get a potential promotion. Your boss has to think you make them look good; you have to justify across your organization that you’re impactful, build relationships, and have supporters to write in your promotion packet. Even slight missteps, such as a missed follow-up or a comment taken out of context, can derail your chances of getting that 3% salary increase with 25% more work. All that effort for low rewards, if any, is the case for quiet quitting.
How To Coast As A Product Manager
Now to the good stuff: How does one coast as a product manager? Costing as a product manager is not as easy as in other professions. As a PM, your task is to lead a product to launch. By design, you’re the lead, and without you, things fall apart. Still, there are ways product managers can minimize the work they do while meeting performance expectations. You’ll soon realize coasting as a product manager is all about perception and how to control it in your favor to do less work.
- Set low expectations
- Delegate everything
- Over-communicate
- Utilize your cross-functional partners (more delegating)
- Automate everything that you can
Runner, first, doesnt cross the finnish line so next year he can beat the record again and claim the extra reward money
byu/scarce_storyteller innonononoyes
1) Setting Low Expectations as A Product Manager
The key to coasting as a product manager is doing the bare minimum to get by. The best way to do this is to set a low baseline. If you end up doing more than what people are expecting, you’ve won.
- Sandbag OKRs – Don’t be ambitious and agree to more work for yourself. Remember, if you contribute to 30M in revenue or 3M, your paycheck doesn’t change. There is no rev share.
- Set low expectations for your performance goals – A lot of people set high expectations so they would look good during the goal-setting meeting. Some employees want to be seen as someone setting high goals. Managers don’t give points for trying; you get points for beating the finish line. Do you want to have a goal of running a marathon and not finishing or setting a goal of a half marathon and smashing it? One looks more impressive, but if you didn’t finish, you failed. Finish the half marathon instead of failing at a full.
- Don’t volunteer to help people out – That just means more work for you. Being nice is not quantifiable to any of your performance metrics. Receiving a positive peer review for assisting won’t get you promoted.
2) Delegate Everything To Coast as a Product Manager
Delegating everything is the perfect way to coast. Leverage this core product management skill to your advantage to help you do as little work as possible. Knock two birds down with one stone! You’re seen as a great product manager if you can delegate and get things done.
Delegating tasks has the aura of great leadership. Assign a responsible person for each task even though you can do it. As a product manager, you’re not the subject matter expert, so why not ask the experts to do it? Empower others and wrap the task around something positive. For example, telling people that working on your task gives you exposure to leaders. You can also use it as an opportunity to gas someone up for their domain knowledge.
“Jimmy, can you take point on this follow-up since you’re the best architect I know on this topic!”
3) Over-Communicate and Be LOUD to Look Busy
Did you even do it if you don’t post about it? Take a page from Instagram influencers. You think Influencers’ lives are great because they post all the highlights of the best parts. Apply this to your role if you want to coast as a Product Manager. The perception of you doing work will go a long way. You can even post about the work that you’ve delegated. When that person finishes the job, post a thread thanking them for their work. People will see you as a great leader and remember you were involved. No one really stops to think, hey, they delegated.
The number one thing that keeps you from getting a promotion: Not being proactive about changing deadlines.
byu/Excellent-Basket-825 inProductManagement
It’s that perception of being on top of things that matters. Take this Reddit post, for example; if you write really great docs but don’t communicate well; people will remember the latter. Remember what we said about setting low expectations? Post updates on Slack every day, talking about project updates, even though they are super menial. Your managers will not remember the content in slack, but they will remember there was Slack from you about the topic every day. Maximizing perceived work is the goal.
4) Hide Behind Multiple Cross-Functional Partners
You can leverage this fog of Product war to push back when people give you work. Dishing out work is key to the rest and vest. As a Product manager, you’re the glue between all the cross-functional partners. Marketing, legal, engineering, sales, finance, and operations all need you because no one has the time to talk to each other. Use this to your advantage. You can push back when people assign things to you by telling them you’re already busy with other teams. Don’t be too specific to keep that cycle going.
“I’m a bit swamped. I have to help team A follow up with B to unblock C”.
5) Get a TPM or Project Manager
Following through with the delegation strategy, you can further delegate if you can hire a project manager or TPM. The project manager or TPM can help with the menial tasks of coordinating, following up, and communicating.
6) Automate Everything Else
Templates – Frameworks and automation are your friends. Sometimes, the more work you do upfront, the less work you need to do later. Templates reduce mental load when you have to redo the same thing repeatedly. PRDs and tracking documents are a few things you can set up. Better yet, ask other PMS for theirs so you can reuse them. Product managers have huge egos; use that to your advantage.
“I really love how your PRDs highlight the customer problem. Do you have a template or frameworks I can use?”
Slack bots – They can automate reminding people for weekly updates and follow-ups and reduce things you must remember to do. Scheduling messages on Slack helps spread the appearance of working throughout the day.
7) Always Be Interviewing
Always be in an interview pipeline somewhere. Let’s say you receive an external offer and decline it; you have that door open to reach back out later. Even though the game is to stay as long as possible to rest and vest, you can’t always win. With layoffs everywhere, you might just be randomly selected. The best insurance is to make sure you’re always well-prepared for that next step.
Find The Right Job and Company to Coast (Rest And Vest)
The type of company and job would make a difference in the ease of coasting or resting and vesting. Finding the right Product Management role is essential to coasting. For example, PMing a B2B product (salesforce) vs. a consumer mobile app makes a huge difference. The B2B platform product roles have internal or enterprise customers that are much easier to deal with. You don’t need to spend extra mental capacity trying to find product market fit. These enterprise users practically tell you what they want. Coasters don’t care about spending time to deal with indecisive customers. Tell us what you want, and we can execute on it.
Working for a non-hustle culture-type company is key as well. Companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe and Salesforce typically have great WLB, and you’re not competing with all the young college grads trying to impress.
Tips To Employers On How To Stop Coasting (Rest and Vest)
Everyone talks about a side hustle. Why need a side hustle if employers give extra incentives for side hustling or doing extra things at work? How motivating would it be if I was paid $600 to help do a PRD for my teammate? I sure would spend some time on my weekend doing it.
Employers don’t think this way. Workers are fed up working hard and going the extra mile with nothing in return, leading to this quiet quitting movement. Employers need to understand employee empathy and understand what they want. Who wants to work extra for free? If there is immediate monetary gain for extra work, people will do extra work. If I work extra hours only to wait 8 months for my performance review to find out there’s no budget, then there’s no incentive for employees to do their best.