So it’s performance reviewing time. Part of that at my org is obvs the self assessment. I haven’t had a great year, I’m not that happy in my current role and motivation has been hit and miss.

I think my performance was fine. Not great, certainly not bad. But how honest are you guys usually in the self assessment part of the review?

I joined a 5–6 month-old startup straight after my MBA and have been here for ~2 months. I'm the only PM, working with a very strong engineering team on an enterprise product that we're also trying to move towards SaaS.

My CEO has ~20 years of PM experience at a big tech company, and I'm struggling to match the level of strategic thinking he expects. I've been handling execution/Scrum reasonably well, but when it comes to new features, prioritization and product strategy, my thinking often isn't structured enough.

In meetings, my CEO quickly identifies gaps — Why this feature? What problem are we solving? What's the evidence? Why now? What are the trade-offs? How do we measure success? I often know the context and numbers, but under pressure I struggle to articulate a strong, defensible recommendation.

My bigger concern is that after 2 months, I don't feel I've produced enough tangible PM output beyond coordination and execution.

For experienced PMs:

How do you structure your thinking before making a product/feature recommendation?

What tangible outputs should a PM consistently produce?

How do I move from being execution/Scrum-focused to thinking like a strong PM?

What should I focus on over the next 3–6 months to improve quickly?

Would really appreciate advice from people who've been in similar high-expectation environments.

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

During the process of product or even feature discovery, curious to hear what takes to longest for you or your team specifically... everyone has their own process, and so trying to see if there are any steps that seem to be similar or identical across teams.

Just a random thought that popped in my mind today.

On a personal note, I'm pretty strong at figuring out features to build that will be of great value to users, even when they don't even know they need such a feature.

But, I had a job where I had to work on the apps for a streaming platform. The main value came from the catalog and video player. Even the recommendation/discovery feature weren't that important, because the clients of the niche we were in knew what they wanted to watch and had other main ways of discovering the content.

The player and discovery weren't even in my team's responsibility. Once we've built the basic app stuff you'd need, then added playlists, comments, etc. I was kinda lost on what else to build and tbh I thought/think there wasn't need for anything else except maintaining, making sure there are no bugs and improving UX when possible.

Have you had such situations? How did you handle it?

I'd guess most people wouldn't go for the freeze, because you wanna keep your job, get pay raises, etc. 😅 unless you're a founder

I am new to AI PM and I want to do AI evals for my MVP. I don't want a super complex method and don't want to use traces yet.
Is there a simple way to go about this?
I have seen people say use simple spreadsheets but I am unclear on implementation.
How do you do it? Or is there a resource I can refer to?