'Look, I shipped a feature' isn't reward-worthy

I was on a solution demo recently with 22 teams showing what they’d launched this month or were about to. Hundreds of us were on the call to cheer them on. A few of us ready to ask (and answer) about benefits and outcomes.

I asked the first PM presenter what the benefit of their feature was. They paused, then asked whether this was a feature demo or a call to share success metrics. They weren’t tracking the benefit. The business had set the targets.

As more PMs presented, only a few came prepared, and more of them started mentioning metrics. They’d seen what got asked earlier and adjusted. After the call, some sent me their data. A few pinged me to discuss how we ensure these questions are part of the format.

The right questions were alive in DMs. They were dead in the meeting room.

This is performance theater. We pattern-match to what’s being graded, not to what the work asks.

We live in a culture where we hand out ‘good jobs’ for the bare minimum. We give participation trophies so no one feels left out.

It shows up across PM work:

• Demos that celebrate launch dates, not outcomes

• Roadmaps that track features, not bets

• Status updates that report activity, not learning

AI raises the velocity, not the bar. Shipping faster with AI is still just shipping if we’re not measuring the impact and outcomes. When iteration gets cheaper, judgment matters more.

Showing the feature we shipped is the bare minimum. What we get paid for, sometimes very, is insight and judgment.

When we’re doing the job, we don’t wait for success to be reported to us. We look at our data, know the number, and answer “compared to what, by how much, and what did we learn.” We ask those questions in the room, not in the DMs afterwards.

This is what makes us PMs and not feature managers. AI is already taking the second job.