The Promotion Treadmill
We recite outcomes over output, yet we reward the reverse.
Sensible people adapt. They chase whatever will make a dashboard twitch inside the review window, then bequeath the fallout to whomever inherits their features, roadmap, and customers. This is not a character flaw; it is how incentives teach rational product managers to behave. Argyris called it the espoused theory versus the theory-in-use. Pfeffer and Sutton framed the same pathology as the knowing–doing gap. The banner says impact, but the ladder pays for throughput.
In an information-rich world, the constraint is human attention. The executive’s hours and minutes are the true currency. Optimize for quarterly growth and you will buy attention on credit, dumping the debt downstream in the form of product debt and harried teams.
Fast promotions are sold as a retention cure, though the evidence is murky. LinkedIn’s longitudinal research shows employees remain 41% longer in firms that actually enable internal mobility. Yet ADP’s panel of 1.2 million workers finds a sharp spike in quitting right after a promotion, especially into management. Promote without support or commensurate pay and you have mostly increased the person’s marketability.
Tenure is short for product managers. According to a CV-based analysis it is between one and two years. Across product roles, average tenure in the current role is 3.4 years. PMs who stick around as individual contributors often end up spread across many teams as organizational glue, from where they drift into non-promotable-task exile for valuing craft over optics. Lenny Rachitsky estimates that it takes about three years to be promoted from associate to senior product manager, and two years from senior to group/lead with another two or three years to director. In what line of work can anyone with only a cursory grasp of the basics expect to be a director within seven or eight years?
Now copy–paste that incentive structure to product management. What “moves the needle” inside a quarter is prized, whereas what pays off in twelve to twenty-four months feels like a career risk. So teams ship novelty, chase engagement, then turn the user into addicts. We call this growth. The economy smiles when the numbers go up today; the bill arrives later. And it’s someone else’s to pay. If that sounds familiar, it is because short-termism is a general disease, not a product management quirk. The pattern matches what you see in capital markets when executives sacrifice long-term investments to hit arbitrary quarterly targets. How about another round of layoffs, chaps? It’s a different domain, but the same myopia.
It rewards extractive design, exactly because it is cheap, measurable, and immediate. It externalizes costs because the next person will handle the debt. It hollows the craft because beyond “senior” the ladder celebrates coordination theatre more than hard thinking about humans and systems.
What we ought to do instead is evaluate the half-life of decisions. Did the system age well twelve months on? Did complexity go down? Did customer trust rise while the support burden fell for more than four consecutive quarters? Promote the person who retires brittle services, halves p95 latency for user-facing components, or cuts ticket volume by a third and sustains it. Tie a bonus to customer satisfaction and system stability a year after launch. Bring the theory-in-use into “alignment” with the espoused theory of the organization. That is how you stop teaching smart people to do dumb things.