Mortality, legacy, and generally what I should be doing with my life has been on my mind a lot this year. My Dad passed away back in February. He was in his 80s but it was still far too soon and happened much too quickly.

Although people say no one talks about your job at your funeral, that’s exactly what I did as part of my eulogy to him. Dad’s job, being a 24/7 on-call underground network lineman at the local power company, shaped his life and the lives of my family for more than half the time he was with us. It shaped the access we had to him since he was often called away to help restore power outages.

We found out, long after he had eased into his long, comfortable retirement, just how much it had hurt him - to be abruptly called away from important moments and events in our lives. But it was important work that he did. It solved very real, very immediate problems. And - bonus! - it was the thing he did to feed us. I thanked him for all that at his funeral.

Friends, a gentle reminder: life is short.

And during your life, you’re going to have to choose - far more often than you’d expect - between doing the visible thing and doing the important thing.

In your early career, it’s easy to chase the most visible things: money, influence, fancy titles at the sexy startup. They all offer fast rewards. They look SO GREAT in social media feeds. I’ve done it. Most of us have, I think?

None of these things compound, however. Worse yet - they strengthen very wrong muscles. You eventually find yourself optimizing for perception and not impact: splashy product launches, big valuations, features that demos well but kind of actually solve nothing, decisions that favors roadmap politics over real user pain points.

They’re distractions from what actually defines your legacy:

Did you do good work on a real problem?

The good work that really matters isn’t always the work that gets celebrated. Good work for product managers isn’t glamorous. It’s not loud. It’s rarely found trending on BlueSky or Product Hunt.

Good work is:

  • ruthlessly clear on who the user is and what they’re trying to do
  • focused on the outcomes, not the outputs
  • shipped, when it could always have been postponed for just a bit more polish

Good work is honest, boring at times, and - thankfully - deeply, deeply rewarding.

So how do you identify a problem that matters?

Good problems are:

  • rooted in real, observable pains
  • urgent for someone, even if they’re invisible to the majority
  • solvable, although maybe not immediately

A good problem, a problem worth solving, doesn’t need a dedicated PR team. It speaks for itself.

In the end, career reputation and success are trailing metrics. You don’t chase them; they show up long after you rolled up your sleeves and done the work. And you won’t remember your compensation tier or titles or follower counts. You’ll remember the work that made something just a tiny bit better for the whole world or maybe just someone in need. And the people in your life? They’ll remember how that good work shaped you and them - how you treated them and how you made them feel while you were doing all of it.

So if you’re at a career crossroads… wondering where to work, or maybe what to build, or what to prioritize next… ask yourself:

Where is the good work on the real problems?