How To Negotiate Your Product Manager Salary

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Hannah Clark: No matter how fast you hit it off with your new job’s hiring manager, the salary conversation kind of feels like a standoff. Even though you both want the same things, their interests and your interests are inherently at odds—after all, they know how much they CAN pay you, but how much they will pay you depends a lot on how well you play the game.

My guest today is Josh Doody, a Salary Negotiation Coach for High Earners and the author of Fearless Salary Negotiation. Before we get into this talk, there’s a few things you should know. The first is that Josh’s tips may actually help you get thousands of dollars more in salary than you otherwise would have received. The other thing is that your mileage may vary—neither Josh nor I know what job you’re applying for, with whom and what their budget is, but we can tell you that you’ll be able to adapt the tips in this episode to every salary negotiation you make for the rest of your life. How often do you get that kind of ROI on a free podcast episode? Alright, let’s jump in.

Welcome back listeners. I’m Hannah Clark with The CPO Club. And if you’re joining us for the first time, we’re a community of tenacious product leaders here to share the weight of scaling your product. And our members are all SaaS-focused PMs who genuinely love their work and they’re driven to help others succeed. So if you want to hear more about that, head on over to theproductmanager.com/membership and let’s get on with the show.

Josh, thank you so much for being here.

Josh Doody: Thanks for having me, Hannah. It’s great to be here. Looking forward to talking with you today.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, me too.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you are today?

Josh Doody: Yeah, I’ll give you like a really brief kind of overview. I started sort of a traditional engineering career. I studied engineering undergrad, started out working in engineering, immediately got bored and went to work for a small software company on, I wanted to be more client facing. So instead of in a cubicle, just punching away on a keyboard, I wanted to be client facing.

And so that was in a business analyst and project manager role that also happened to be for a software company that sold HR software for doing like performance evaluations and succession planning and goal planning and compensation planning. And so I spent several years this is in the very early days of SaaS.

They were actually transitioning from like on premise to SaaS at the time, which for most of your listeners probably sounds like a ‘what?’, but there was a time when people just bought software and installed it places. I know that and then they moved to a SaaS model. And so part of that was consulting with our SaaS customers on how to use our software to do all those things including compensation planning.

Eventually I got an MBA and then realized that I had figured out how to negotiate my salary on my own. Got pretty good results and friends and family would ask me to help them with that and I had results helping them and so just for fun, I wrote a book called Fearless Salary Negotiation was meant to be a passion project and published it and it did pretty well.

And then people would get the book and they started reaching out and asking me if I could just do it for him. And I said, okay, I guess. And so I worked with a couple of people. The first person that I worked with, I asked her after we finished working together, she had my book. I had helped her husband, so she knew the playbook.

And I said, why did you hire me? You asked to hire me. Why? When you could have just read my book. And she said, oh, I just was hoping that you would just tell me what to do, like exactly what to do. So I’d have to think about it. Light bulb went off and then flip the switch and said, okay, maybe I can make a business out of this and built the Fearless Salary Negotiation business, focusing on coaching people through salary negotiations.

And here I am today.

Hannah Clark: And here you are today. And here we are talking about exactly that, which will be negotiating salaries, which I think is very intriguing to a lot of listeners out there.

So to kick us off, what are some of the biggest misconceptions that candidates have when approaching the topic of salary with prospective employers?

Josh Doody: I think that for me, when I think of misconceptions around negotiating salary or compensation, most people I think perceive, because of the word negotiate and the position that they’re in usually as being like the “don’t have” any leverage, that they perceive it to be like an adversarial sort of combat.

And I see negotiating comp as more of a collaboration between two parties who want the same thing. They both want this person to join the company. And you’re just trying to find sort of what the set of parameters are that make everybody happy with that person joining the company. And so it’s almost never combative, it’s never adversarial, it’s almost always collaborative.

So I think that’s the biggest misconception is that you’re gonna have to fight your recruiter, fight a hiring manager, and it’s gonna be ugly and boy, they’re gonna think really badly of you. And that’s just not how it goes. It’s a collaborative process and not combative or adversarial.

Hannah Clark: That’s very good to know because I think it’s very easy, especially when you’re you feel like you’re coming to the table with someone on the other side that it’s a kind of a push and pull situation. But that I think when you put in perspective, everybody wants to come out on top, right?

So when thinking about that, how would you suggest folks answer the what are your salary expectations questions or should they answer it at all?

Josh Doody: Yeah. So I guess the technical answer to your question about questions is they should answer it. They have to answer the question. The question is, how do you answer? And so the obvious thing to do when you’re asked a question about your salary expectations is to answer with a number. That is how I recommend not answering that question. Instead, I mentioned earlier, it’s collaborative and not combative, but it is a game in the game theory sense.

Underneath a lot of what I do is game theory, which many of your listeners and your community are probably familiar with game theory. And they say, ah, and then some people say game theory, is that, can they have an idea of what game theory is? All game theory is just the science of decision making.

It’s how humans react to incentives. And so underneath that is game theory, which means that you are doing things and not doing things, you’re making decisions that put your, you in the best situation to succeed while avoiding giving your counterparty leverage over you, giving them a leg up. You do that in all games, right?

If I’m a quarterback playing football and I line up and I see that they’re in a run defense, I’m going to throw the ball. Why? Because they’re giving me the throw and they’re not giving me the run. And so similarly, I’m not going to give them the numbers. I’m going to give them something else because they’re trying to get numbers that they have an advantage on me.

In this conversation that we’re having and so I recommend instead of giving a number in response to the salary expectations question that you say something like I don’t really have a number in mind right now. I’m very excited about this opportunity. I think I’m going to be a valuable contributor to the team.

I look forward to hearing what you suggest when we get to that point. That’s probably 75 or 80 percent of the time, that’s all you need to say. And they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say, I tried and they’ll move on. So yeah, don’t give numbers. To elaborate just a little bit, I could talk about this for hours by the way.

And this is probably the topic that if you I guess now you could do this, right? Like maybe I should do this. A friend of mine made a little GPT that like is simulates me based on all my writing and stuff. I wonder what would it say, but this is the thing that I’ve talked about the most or written about the most over the years is the soapbox that I spend the most time on.

So the reason that you don’t want to say a number is if you think about it from a little different framing, I think it makes a lot of sense why sharing a number is not in your best interest. If instead of, Hey, what are your salary expectations if you come work for us? Which sounds like you say a number and they say, okay, that sounds great.

Let’s do it. Which might happen, but it’s almost always a bad result. What if instead they said, Hey, you don’t know anything about our business. You don’t know how profitable we are. You don’t know how many of your position we’re trying to hire. You don’t know how long we’ve been trying to fill those roles.

You don’t exactly know what the job responsibilities are. You don’t know what our budget is, but given that you don’t know any of that stuff, why don’t you take a wild guess what we might pay you to do the job that we’re going to offer you soon, hopefully. And then it’s well, I don’t know. The truth is you will almost never guess correctly.

You’re either going to guess lower. You’re going to go outside. If you guess low, you’re going to cost yourself money for sure, because they would have paid you more. And frequently you’ll guess solo that they will pay you more than you guessed than the number that you share with them only because the bottom of their pay range is above the number that you suggested. On the other hand, you could say a number that’s so high that you blow them away, and they just stop talking to you.

That is more rare, but some recruiters will immediately say, Oh, we’re not talking to the right person. We’re sorry that we wasted your time. Good luck. And you’ll stop having a conversation. You don’t want that because the more you talk to them, the more that actually interviewing well gives you an opportunity to affect what their budget might be.

So they have a range in mind before you talk to them. And as you talk to them, they might think, Oh, goodness, we can’t pass on this candidate. We’ve been trying to fill this role for six months. Yes. Our budget is capped at this number, but if we don’t get Josh on the team, we’re never going to find another Josh for six more months.

And how much money is that going to cost us? So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to throw in a sign of us or whatever. And so you could get a lot of concessions just by interviewing well. So you put the numbers aside and you basically say, I don’t want to talk about numbers yet, because I’m going to blow you away in my interviews.

And the more that I interview with you and impress upon you how important I am and how valuable I’m going to be to your team in this role, the more flexible you’re going to be on those numbers that you were asking about earlier. So let’s not talk about numbers now. We’ll interview, then you’ll make a suggestion, and then we’ll talk about that suggestion.

Hannah Clark: I really like that way of framing things. And I think that that’s something that a lot of us can get really in a tunnel vision state of, well, you got to have that right number. Because I agree, that salary range is so opaque, but you’re not really thinking about, how are you building up your value before we get to that point? So I really like that way of framing it.

But on the topic of advice for interviewing and negotiating salary, what are your top tips for tactfully negotiating salary once you are down to the brass tacks of having to talk about numbers?

Josh Doody: I really have two things that I tell every client that I work with.

One of them we already covered. Don’t share your salary expectations. The other one is, even though you’re not sharing your salary expectations with them, you should have a number in mind before you get an offer. And I call it your minimum acceptable salary, which is about full. You could call it your walkaway number. But before you get an offer, you should have a number and literally write it down on paper.

That’s what I tell people to do. And that could be your total comp number. It can be your base salary number, whatever’s most important to you. Most people, it’s probably gonna be total comp in the industry is for folks who are working in where your community is gonna work in product management. And so you want to write a number down.

The reason is that you can objectively evaluate the offer that you get when you have the number written down first. So if the number you have on paper is $250,000 a year, that you get an offer, you compare the offer to the paper. How does it look? Is it right on the nose? Great. Is it way higher? You underestimated how valuable you are.

Is it way lower? Oh, you have to do some work in a negotiation or maybe this isn’t the right role for you. But it gives you a way to objectively evaluate that offer, and it gives you a way to inform what your strategy needs to look like. Those three situations I just mentioned too low on those too high.

Each one of those is a different type of negotiation, and you’ll have different things that you might do in that negotiation to try to. For example, rescue an offer that’s way too low or to try and just squeeze more value out of an offer that’s already pretty darn good. And so for the individual, I think it makes it much easier for each opportunity, by the way, this isn’t just one number for every opportunity combined.

It’s for each opportunity that you’re considering. You write down what your minimum acceptable salary is. So when they make the offer, you can say, how does this compare to my minimum? So that’s a big one. The big two are don’t share salary expectations. Have a number in mind before you get the offer. And then from there, some kind of very tactical things are, you should always negotiate.

Most people are afraid if they negotiate and they “don’t have” leverage or something like that, that the offer could go away. The offer is not going away. They have invested a lot of time and money in getting to the point where they want to make you an offer. They’ve identified that you’re the candidate they want to work for their team, and they’re not going to be dissuaded from making that happen just because you asked for more money.

They might say, sorry, there’s no room to negotiate. We already made you our best and final offer. That happens sometimes. My stats say it’s somewhere around 8% of the time. So about 8% of the time you’ll get stonewalled and they’ll say, well, we’ve made our best offer and you’ve confirmed that because you asked for more and they did not give you more.

And then, the other 92% of the time, they’ll find some flexibility. They’ll throw in a sign on bonus or give you some more cash, or they’ll give you a little bit more equity or whatever that is, or maybe there’s something else they can be flexible on. And so you should negotiate. There’s almost all upside.

I’ve been doing this professionally for eight years, I think. Two times has an offer gone away. Both times it was a very small independently owned engineering shop. I’m talking like five employees where the person who was making and negotiating the offer had no business doing that. And they were wearing six different hats at this company kind of thing.

And as soon as they bristled at a pretty simple counter offer, my client said in both cases, they were independent. But my client said, yeah, there were some red flags there. They each had a backup offer that went away. I’ve never seen an offer go away with big tech, despite pushing really hard in some cases.

And so just the fear of if I negotiate, the offer is going to go away. It’s a valid fear, but the reality is the offer is not going away. So that’s a very tactical thing is you should negotiate. I know that’s self serving for me to say, but just to give people confidence that offers don’t go away.

It’s like a fraction of 1% of the time the offer goes away. And 0%, if you’re talking about like a big tech company, for example. Really tactical, if you’re going to counter offer, pick whatever number is most important to you and add 10 or 20 percent to that number and ask for that. If you’re totally stuck, if you’re barely persuaded, like you weren’t going to negotiate, I’ve talked to you into negotiating.

You’re not really all in on going aggressive with it. Ask for 10 to 20 percent. 10% is closer to, you don’t feel good about it. You don’t really think there’s flexibility, but why not find out. 20% is you’re being pretty aggressive because you have reason to believe that they’re super interested in bringing you on board in this particular position, or they haven’t been able to fill the role for a long time or other signals that you might see that you can be aggressive. So somewhere between 10 and 20 percent is your counteroffer.

And the last little tactic I’ll give is that once you’ve done that, there’s almost always an opportunity to ask for a sign on bonus at the end. If you’re asking for the right number, they’re going to give you a partial ‘yes’, is what you’re hoping for, which means they don’t give you a full number you ask, or they give you part of it. And they say, okay, well, I understand you can’t get all the way there. If you can add a $10,000 sign on bonus I’ll sign today.

And a lot of times I’ll say, all right, here’s 10K. And so you can get that 10K for free. So those are my tactics are make sure you have a number in mind before you start negotiating, 10 to 20 percent and that you should negotiate.

Hannah Clark: Wow. Okay. These are super valuable tips. You can basically get your vacation to Greece covered, but just adding on a few extra requests. Also I’m feeling like maybe the offer is not going away. It should be on your merch somewhere. That sounds like, that’s the thing that I think everyone really needs to take away from this conversation.

Josh Doody: I think it should be. I’ve spent so much time talking about don’t share your salary expectations, but they’re not going to take your offer away. It should be right there. I mean, it’s equally as important.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. Yeah. And I know that that’s a big fear.

Let’s talk about a little bit because you had mentioned about leverage and I think that that’s also top of mind for a lot of folks. Let’s say we’re applying for a job that is more senior than the positions that we’ve held in the past. So how can we avoid letting that limitation of our experience become a liability or perceive it to be a liability during our salary negotiation?

Josh Doody: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s interesting because what I hear when you ask that question is like there’s a subtext of imposter syndrome, right? Which is like, yeah, I mean, I’m currently, a senior product manager and I don’t know if I’m ready to be a lead product manager or something like that.

Right? And I think this is where it’s interesting because my answer is probably different than what you would expect. But the answer is a tool called positioning, which is usually a sales and marketing tool. Positioning statement is very simple as version is, I do X for Y. And so, I do plumbing repairs for busy condo owners.

It would be a positioning statement, okay? And so as you’re interviewing and then negotiating with a company, first of all, they’ve considered you for the more senior role. So that’s evidence that you have some kind of leverage there. But as you are interviewing, you have the opportunity to learn more from them about what they’re hiring you for. You can read the job description. You’ll hear them talking about the role. And so your job to demonstrate to them that you’re the right person for this more senior role is, yeah, I have the background doing the kind of nuts and bolts of what we’re talking about here.

But for this particular reason, I’m talking to you and not to that other company, is that I have a unique skill set and experience that makes me qualified to do this role for you. So that’s where you want to focus is instead of I can do this job at a more senior level than I’m currently doing, you say, this more senior job is really well-aligned with my experience and the things that I can do out of the box right now.

So, and there are, you could think of, like, a lot of examples of this, where, you know, for example, you might be pretty good at a thing in a certain domain, and then you go over to another domain. You’re really good at that thing in that domain because nobody else is doing it over there. Right? And so, like, you could just take a scope.

I’ll give you an example for my own personal life. So I play pickleball a lot, a lot of pickleball. A lot of people who come into pickleball are tennis players and are they qualified to play pickleball from day one? No. But do they have the raw skills that are transferable to pickleball? Absolutely they do, most of them.

And so tennis players are the people who show up and immediately just start being pretty darn good at pickleball. Why? Because they were good senior pickleball players. They’re pro pickleball players before. No, because they had a skillset that was transferable into a domain pickleball where it was super useful right away.

So you can do the same thing if you have a product management background as well. Yes, I don’t have the senior in my title right now, but I do have experience in textiles or B2B blah, blah, blah type web applications. Whatever the thing is, the kind of, there’s so there’s a billion type of products. But the types of products that they’re helping to develop, they could have some experience that transfers in this domain where they say, Oh, yeah you have done this kind of development before you built a team doing this kind of product development.

And that’s what we need right now. So that’s what it is aligning your skill set and experience with what they need in that senior role, so you’re taking away the junior senior kind of distinction, and you’re bringing in the I have domain expertise that is relevant to what you’re doing, and I can bring it to bear for you immediately and that’s valuable to you using positioning.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that’s really resonant.

So coming back to sort of the interview process, obviously, salary negotiation is a part of the interview process. It’s a very important part of the process, but there’s also the matter of like you said, getting to know the company better and being able to better persuade the interviewer and or the recruiter of the value that you’re bringing to the company.

So what kinds of questions would be asking interviewers in order to stand out, but also to gain information that can help you determine whether it’s a good fit?

Josh Doody: That’s a great question. Mostly because I felt like my last question, I was being a little bit vague. When I said, Oh yeah, you just find out more about the domain and how you can help them.

Well, this is how you do that. So this is a great question. This goes back right back to positioning. So the things that you need to know to put a bow on my positioning and then to tie it into your question here about what questions to be asking, the things you need to know are what are the goals of the team that you’re joining in the role?

Let’s say it’s a more senior role. And what are the challenges that are preventing that team from achieving their goals? If you can discern what those are, then you can say things to them that are going to be very, very potent to their ears. And the reason is that anytime you’re interviewing, most people think of interviews is like a big deal because for the interviewee, the person being interviewed, it’s a really big deal.

They might have spent the last 2 weeks prepping for this interview. They cleared their calendar today. They woke up early. They had a healthy breakfast, got some exercise in. They’re doing their interview prep. Now they’re going to do the interview. It’s going to be 2 hours. It’s going to be grueling. It’s going to be really hard and it’s very important.

Then they’re going to have to rest afterwards and maybe debrief. On the other hand, the interviewer is probably just doing their regular thing, doing their job and then “ping!”, they get like an Outlook reminder that says, Hey, don’t forget to interview Josh in 10 minutes. And they go, shoot, I forgot, totally forgot about this interview.

And they scramble and they try to find a copy of your resume and they get it up on the screen. Now they’re interviewing you. They do that for 2 hours and they go back to whatever they’re doing. The key thing there in that story is what they were doing before they got that being and what they’re going to do after the interview.

They’re going to be trying to accomplish their goals and overcome the challenges that are keeping them up at night. Interviewing is a side quest for them, even though it’s a big deal to me as the person being interviewed. And so what you want to do is discern what their goals and challenges are. If you can articulate to them, if you bring me on this team in this role, I will help you accomplish the goals that you have as a company, as a team, as an individual manager.

And I will help you to overcome the challenges that you have. They’re going to be much more interested in hiring you because you’re going to be not saying, look at my resume. It’s great. Look at these skills. Look at my job level in my previous, you’re saying I have the skills and ability and experience to not only understand what your problems are, to understand what you’re trying to accomplish, but to describe to you how I will help you accomplish those things.

And so that’s how you do that in general. To answer your current question, what question should you be asking? You should be asking them what their goals and challenges are. That’s the number one question. So you interview for 45 minutes. At the end of the interview, the person out of courtesy basically says, Hey, I’ve been talking for 45 minutes.

You have any questions for me about our company or anything we’re doing? Is there anything I can answer for you? And then you should say, actually, I was wondering, what are you working on right now as a team? Like, what’s your number one priority that you’re doing as a team right now that you were doing before I talked to you?

They will tell you. And the reason is people love to talk about themselves. And that’s all they’ve been thinking about for the last three days. They might’ve kept them up last night. So they’re literally real time, maybe even as you’re answering their interview questions, thinking about the stuff they’re trying to accomplish, thinking about the challenges they’re having, thinking about the, that this person called in sick or this test failed and they’re going to have to roll back to the previous production role, whatever it is, right?

And so they’re thinking about those things anyway. They want to talk about that stuff. So you ask them, what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? What are your challenges? What’s keeping you up at night right now? What’s preventing you from reaching the goals you just described cause I’m really curious.

And then the next interview that you have, when you’re answering questions, you can tell them how you can help them accomplish those goals and those challenges that you just got from an interviewer. So, they’re real, they’re tangible, they’re urgent. To me, those are not only the two most valuable questions, but they’re almost the only questions that you need to ask because almost anything else that people would ask about can be resolved later.

How much vacation time do you get? Not worth wasting an interview question on. That’s in the handbook. You know what I mean? So you should be asking them what are your goals as a team right now? What are you trying to accomplish? What’s your north star? And then what are the challenges that are preventing you from reaching your goals?

What’s a problem that you’re trying to solve right now as a team? Your brain should be turning, how can I describe to them how I can help them reach those goals and overcome the challenge they just described to me right now, either in this interview or in my next interview?

Hannah Clark: Okay, this is super, super helpful to know for folks looking for a new job.

But now I’m curious about folks who are within their existing job trying to negotiate a pay increase. So whether that’s, maybe moving up in a promotion or, the review time comes around and it’s time to talk about compensation or maybe you’ve received a, a raise that you don’t think is necessarily reflective of your abilities or contributions.

So do you have any advice for listeners who are looking to negotiate a pay increase of any kind with their current employer?

Josh Doody: Yeah. So my first piece of advice is forget everything that I just said. It’s a totally different process. Yeah, it’s funny. Even when I wrote my book, I spent a lot of time thinking about this.

And the truth is that negotiating a new job offer is a very unique and special thing, where you do have a lot of leverage because your ‘yes’ is valuable. When you’re already working for the company, you already know what you’re making and so to, so today. So that is that whole kind of misunderstanding or arbitrage opportunity is gone.

They’ve also seen your work in real time. Also, you don’t have to guess what the goals and challenges are because you’re there. And so instead what you do, if you’re looking for a promotion or a raise, back to my book, asking for a promotion and asking for a raise in my book are two separate chapters. It took me months to figure out whether that should be two chapters or one, because the process is the same for each of those things.

And a lot of times they will run in a pair. I chose to make them two separate chapters, but it’s the same process. The process is whatever you’re shooting for, if it’s a target salary that you’re hoping to get or a target job that you’re hoping to get, or both together, what you identify is one, what is the thing that you’re aiming for?

And so for target salary, I said before, don’t share your salary expectations. So now you have to have a number. You need to pick a number. And the whole premise of the way that I think about raising promotions is, you want to give your manager the person who’s going to be your biggest advocate and most valuable advocate for this, everything that they could possibly need on a silver platter to get this done for you without having to do any work for themselves.

They’re not gonna have to do anything, but just be a middleman or middle woman to make this happen for you. So, first thing you do is if you’re gonna ask for a raise, figure out what your salary should be. It should be realistic. It can be based on market data. It can be based on your performance.

Hopefully it can be based on the value that you add. If you’re doing anything that creates more revenue for the business or saves costs, you should be documenting those things. I call them accomplishments. So I did this thing and it generated another $100,000 in revenue last year. That’s great. You can’t get all that a hundred K in salary, but you can get some of it.

Sometimes. I did this thing that saved us a quarter million dollars a quarter last year. That’s great. You might be able to get some of that back in salary. And then the last that there’s a, that’s a, what I call three legged stool, which is more revenue cost savings and a cycle time reduction or time savings, right?

So instead of taking us six months to ship this product, we did it in two months because of what I did last year. That’s super valuable to any company. So you want to describe what your accomplishments are. You pick a salary. I think I should, I’m paid at 250 right now. I think I should be closer to 280 or 290.

Here’s why. Accomplishment, accomplishment, accomplishment, along with the value of that accomplishment. I made us another million dollars here. I saved us a quarter million dollars a quarter there, and I reduced cycle time from six to two months, right? And so then you take that and you might pair it with a promotion.

By the way, I’ve also been doing this job for three years. I’m already mentoring three more junior product managers. I think it’s time for me to have the senior title, or I think it’s time for me to be a principal product manager, a lead product manager. I’ve been doing that job anyway. So that’s the kind of the secret sauce is you do the thing and then you ask to make it official, different than a new job negotiation.

So you say to them, I’d like to be lead product manager. I’d like to have this salary. The reason that I’d like to do those things is I know what the lead product manager responsibilities are because it’s on the company website. I’m already doing all those things. Let me show you how I’m doing them. Also, I’ve done these things in the last year or so that are super valuable.

Here’s how valuable they are. And so therefore I would like this new title and I would like this new compensation and you’re taking this to your manager. You have a conversation with them first, and then you follow up with an email to summarize everything I just said. And you say, I think this is where I would like to be.

Can you help me get there? What does the plan look like for us to do this? And then you can have a dialogue with your manager about what the timeline looks like, what their expectations are. Maybe if there are gaps, maybe there’s a difference between their perception of your work and your presentation of your work, and you have a conversation about that.

Well, I understand that you think you’re ready, but here are the three things that I haven’t seen you doing too much of that I’d like to get you an opportunity to do. You say, great, how do I get reps for that? How do I get in there and do that thing? Can you give me a project that will let me flex those muscles?

And you go that way. So you start with what is your goal that you’re trying to accomplish, then you demonstrate that you already achieved that goal. And you just want to make it official with the promotion and or raise to the target salary that you have in mind.

Hannah Clark: And again, a collaborative process and not adversarial. It comes back to that same kind of mindset of we’re really working together.

Josh Doody: Even more collaborative, I would say too, just as an aside, much more collaborative, because you’re going to your manager. They’re managing your career, right? Among other things, but they’re managing you. And so you’re going to them and saying, Hey, you’re my manager.

Help me to figure out how to do this. Here’s where I think I should be. Do you agree? And how do we get me there? What is the timeline? What are the responsibilities do I need to take on? How do I get these projects? How do we make this happen? So you are literally collaborating with them. And you’re doing all their homework for them because they’re busy people, like I just said, they’re the same person who interviewed you before you hired, right?

They were busy being on Outlook. They did the interview. They went back to work. And so you’re saying to them, here’s everything I think you need. I’ve already got the case laid out. If you’re okay with just passing it along for approval, let’s do it. And if you’re not, let’s talk about why that is and what the timeline might look like.

And we’re going to work together to get this done. And you can tell me when it’ll get done and how we’ll get it done.

Hannah Clark: Awesome. And yeah, I think that I’m a big advocate for having great relationship with your higher ups, so I think that collaborative process is just right on the money.

Before we wrap, I would like to put some of these numbers into perspective, just coming more back to, the exciting new job prospects. What are some of the salary ranges for product jobs? I know everyone’s so curious. What are some of the salary ranges for the product jobs that your clients are currently getting?

Josh Doody: Yeah, that’s a tough one. It’s all over the map. Just like it really is. It’s not even just product jobs. This is hard for, by the way, because, what’s a salary for like a senior software engineer?

And then I would say to you, is that a Google or is that a 6 person startup that just raised a Series A? So I’ve seen, I just worked with somebody who was very senior and we’ll say we’ll round to like a half a million a year. This is like a very, very senior product manager. I’ve also worked with folks recently who are around the 200 to 250 K number.

So there’s a really big range that depends on what kind of company. So not just like what the company is, but like, what are they doing? How important is “product” to this company? And do they think about product in that way? But I would say, you’re looking at like an experienced PM up to a very, very experienced PM who’s like running major projects at a big tech company from 200K to 500K. I will also say there’s much better data out there than what I have. This is very anecdotal data. So I have a survivor bias problem with the people that I work with. Meaning, they see all my marketing, everything I’m advertised as working with high earners.

So nobody who’s a PM that’s making 50K a year is going to reach out to me to coach them because they’re going to be dissuaded by my marketing for better or worse. So I don’t talk to those people. They might be out there, but I don’t talk to them. So Levels.fyi is a great place to go to get information on that.

Teamblind could be a good place to go, depending on the company, even Glassdoor and some of those companies can give you more data. But that’s what I’ve seen. You’re asking based on my experience. What have I seen? That’s what I’ve seen.

Hannah Clark: Awesome. Well, it’s good to see those resources as well, and I’m sure we’re all going to be snooping around to see what we can what our next job offer might be.

Speaking of snooping around online, where can folks follow your work?

Josh Doody: Yeah, so my website is fearlesssalarynegotiation.com. You can also find me on Twitter. I’m pretty active there. Josh Doody on Twitter. I’m also on LinkedIn. Josh Doody on LinkedIn. Very easy to find, thanks to my weird last name. So yeah, FearlessSalaryNegotiation.com is probably the primary place to go. And then you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Hannah Clark: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Josh. This has been very intriguing and very informative.

Josh Doody: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at TheProductManager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club wherever you get your podcasts.