30 Career Tips from a PM – #15 Use market sizing to illustrate your impact

Career Tips from a PM (15/30) – Use market sizing to illustrate your impact.

It’s one thing to say you’ve delivered over 200 features to your customers, and a whole other thing to say it captured 10% of your market.

Market sizing is a process where we estimate the total size of a market and translate it into the total volume or revenue a product or service can command. Or, in layman’s terms:

How much money can our product or service make?

Funny enough, you can use this same process to quantify the impact your past achievements have. Not only does this provide a bit of variety in your CV or resume, but it also provides a metric you can use when you, for one reason or another, don’t have other metrics to highlight.

I won’t go into the process here (but if you’d like a step-by-step, Google “market sizing guide” for any number of excellent walkthroughs), but here’s why it matters:

You can turn this:

“Designed and developed 200+ features.”

Into this:

“Captured 10% of the <industry> market by delivering 200+ features.”

Or turn this:

“Prioritized and refined team roadmaps.”

Into this:

“Positioned the company to serve 10+ million users by maintaining and refining strategic roadmaps.”

Much more attractive to a recruiter or hiring manager, isn’t it?

Use market sizing to illustrate your impact.