Advocate Yourself Out of a Job
Argue for the company-optimal allocation of your team even when it defunds you — and read the response.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
Most operators defend their project's headcount by default. Lovinsky does the opposite: he audits his own project against the full company roadmap, and if it does not deserve the resources it has, he says so to leadership — even when that means arguing his own team out of existence. The move is simultaneously an allocation decision and a diagnostic test of the organization: a healthy team rewards it, an unhealthy one punishes it, and either result is worth knowing early.
Origin
Noam Lovinsky's account of his first months at YouTube (post-acquisition, ~month three), where he told leadership not to staff 50 engineers on the product his own startup had built. YouTube wound the project down and handed him the Creator focus area, one of the three top-level YouTube orgs alongside Hunter Walk (viewer) and Shishir Mehrotra (advertiser).
Core principles
- 01Judge your project's priority relative to the whole roadmap, not relative to its own goals.
- 02Advocating for the org-optimal answer is the highest-leverage thing a PM can do, even when it is locally costly.
- 03The organization's reaction to a self-sacrificing recommendation is information about whether you should stay.
- 04Confidence to make the move comes from actually internalizing company strategy, not from courage.
How to run it
- 1
Build the company-wide priority picture first
Before evaluating your own project, learn the rest of the roadmap and the company strategy well enough that you could rank every investment in the org if asked to. Without that picture, you have no standing to make the call.
Pro tip Lovinsky's confidence test: 'how I might prioritize all of these investments if I were given the opportunity to do that.' If you can't answer that, you're not ready to make the claim.
- 2
Rank your own project honestly against that list
Ask whether the resources currently on your project would produce more for the business somewhere else on that roadmap. Score the counterfactual, not the effort already sunk into your work.
Watch out Sunk cost is strongest when the project is one you personally built or sold into the company. That is exactly the case where the honest answer is hardest.
- 3
Say it out loud to leadership, with the reallocation proposed
Bring the recommendation directly, in explicit resource terms ('we should not have 50 engineers on this'), and propose where the team would be better served. Salvage the parts worth keeping by folding them into an existing product rather than framing it as pure cancellation.
Pro tip Pair the kill with a build: name the focus area the team should serve instead so leadership hears reallocation, not retreat.
Watch out Do this before you have quietly burned two more quarters of the company's money defending it.
- 4
Read the response as a signal about the org
If the organization rewards a decision that was clearly right for the business and clearly costly for you, it is a healthy culture and you can keep making these bets. If it punishes you, that is a fact about the org you now know cheaply and early.
Pro tip Judge the org partly on the people: whether you have a nose for a high-functioning team is what makes this bet survivable.
Watch out This framework assumes a healthy culture. In a political org, the same move gets you a smaller team and no upside — the diagnostic is real, but so is the cost.
- 5
Extend the same logic to your reporting line
Apply the same org-optimal honesty to your own placement. When Lovinsky was struggling reporting to the CEO, he asked to be layered under Hunter Walk — a request nobody had ever made of him since — because it meant better support, better work and a better structure for the team.
Pro tip Frame it as an org design change ('combine the organizations this way, divide and conquer that way'), not a confession of failure.
Watch out Only do this when the person you'd report to is someone you'd learn from. Layering yourself under a weak manager buys you nothing.
In the wild
Lovinsky joined YouTube via the acquisition of his startup and spent his first months rebuilding that product on Google infrastructure. Looking at YouTube's full roadmap, he concluded the effort did not merit its staffing and told the leadership team he did not think 50 engineers should be on the project — knowing it likely negotiated him out of a job at month three.
→ Leadership agreed, wound the project down, folded the useful features into the existing product, and put him in charge of the Creator focus area — one of YouTube's three top-level product organizations.
In the Creator role, reporting to CEO Salar Kamangar, Lovinsky found the questions coming at him were 'from a different planet' — a scale of thinking he had not yet developed. Rather than white-knuckle it, he went to Salar and proposed combining organizations so he would report to Hunter Walk instead.
→ The change was made. Hunter became a strong manager and support, Lovinsky grew fast, and he later moved up to lead the viewer PM organization at YouTube.
Common mistakes
Defending headcount because headcount is the scoreboard
Treating team size as personal status inverts the PM's job. If the company would do better spending your engineers elsewhere, protecting them is a tax on the business that you are personally collecting.
Making the call without the strategy picture
Volunteering your project for the chopping block without having internalized the company's priorities is not courage, it's noise. The recommendation only lands because you can defend where those resources should go instead.
Assuming any org will reward it
Lovinsky's move worked because YouTube was a healthy, high-talent team. Running the same play in a political organization can genuinely end badly — the point is that the outcome tells you which kind of org you are in.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders and senior ICs newly inside a large company (often post-acquisition) who suspect their own project is not the highest-value use of their team.
Not ideal for
Environments where you have no visibility into company strategy, or political cultures where a self-defunding recommendation would simply be accepted with no reallocation upside.
From the transcript
“I don't think we should be putting 50 engineers on this project.”
“in the right organizations even in in large organizations advocate for like what's best for the team. Advocate for what's best for the organization even…”
“No one has ever come to me in my career and said, I would like you to layer me”
“in that moment I was just like this is how I will do better work. This is how I will get better support.”
From the episode
The happiness and pain of product management
Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)