A Mid-Level PM’s Guide to Driving Impact and Influencing Up

Moving away from managing tickets to driving real outcomes

When Maya joined her new team as a mid-level Product Manager at a fast-growing fintech startup, she felt confident. She kept the roadmap updated, wrote crisp Jira tickets, and led flawless sprint rituals. Her peers liked her, engineering respected her, and her designer said she was “easy to work with.” Yet each time the quarterly product review rolled around, Maya felt uneasy.

Leadership would ask, “What impact did this feature have?” She’d flip through dashboards, pull together usage data, and pray the numbers told a story. But too often, they didn’t. The feature shipped. Users clicked it. But did it actually matter?

Then came the layoffs.

Two product teams were cut. Maya's team survived, but barely. Her director was blunt: “The teams we let go couldn’t tie their work to meaningful business outcomes. Features were delivered, but no real value moved.”

That moment was a wake-up call.

Maya realised she wasn’t managing a product—she was managing a backlog. And if she couldn’t change how her team worked, they might be next.

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The Enlightenment: From Feature Factory to Outcome Engine

Determined to change, Maya dove into product leadership content. She found inspiration in the work of Melissa Perri (“Escaping the Build Trap”), Teresa Torres (“Continuous Discovery Habits”), and Marty Cagan’s distinction between feature teams and empowered product teams. The core insight that clicked for her:
Outputs are what you build. Outcomes are what changes because of it.

She started by reframing her team’s mission. Instead of owning a “widget builder,” they now owned a part of the user journey—activating new users post-signup. Their new goal? Increase activation rate by 20%.

To do this, Maya built a simple KPI tree. At the top: “Activated Users.” Beneath it: metrics like “Time to First Action,” “Task Completion Rate,” and “Drop-off at Step 2.” This tree became their compass.

Every discovery sprint began with a behavior they wanted to shift. Every roadmap item had a hypothesis attached. Every retro circled back to whether outcomes moved.

Six months later, activation was up 23%, and churn in month one dropped 18%. Maya’s director highlighted her team in a company-wide review. More importantly, her engineers were energised. “It finally feels like we know why we’re building,” one said.

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Why Outcomes Matter More Than Ever

We're entering a new era in product—one where business results speak louder than velocity.

From Spotify to Google, layoffs have become a harsh reminder that features don’t protect you—outcomes do. Here are some recent examples:

Spotify: In January 2023, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek laid off 6% of staff, later increasing the cuts to 17% by year’s end. His reasoning? “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth... our cost structure is still too big for the environment we’re in.” Teams that weren’t directly impacting revenue or user value were the first to go.

Airbnb: Airbnb took a similar stance in 2020 when 25% of the company was let go. CEO Brian Chesky wrote: “We will need to reduce investment in activities that do not directly support the core of our host community.” Projects in Transportation, Studios, and Hotels were cut in favor of core booking metrics like Nights Booked and Host Activation.

Google: Google’s Sundar Pichai echoed the pattern: “We hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today… [We’ve] reviewed product areas to ensure roles align with our highest priorities.”

Twitter.com/X: And Elon Musk, in his characteristically blunt style, justified cutting 50% of Twitter’s staff by tweeting: “Unfortunately, there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.”

These decisions weren’t about bad people or poor execution. They were about impact. Teams that couldn’t prove they were moving the needle—on revenue, retention, growth—became liabilities.

In this environment, PMs who can demonstrate clear outcome ownership have leverage. Everyone else is replaceable.

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How to Lead With Outcomes, Even If You’re Not the Head of Product

You don’t need a CPO title to drive an outcome mindset. You just need curiosity, clarity, and courage. Here’s how to start, especially as a mid-level PM looking to influence up: