Product Manager Evaluation Framework

As a product leader, helping the team grow and develop is one of our most
critical responsibilities. The first step to growing as a product manager is
understanding the skills that are required and what “great” looks like for each of
these skills. Then, stock can be taken of the current level in each of these skills to
understand strength and areas of development, and based on that, development
plans can be agreed.

Different product managers certainly have different strengths, and different

environments require different profiles of product managers (consider, for
example, about the different emphasis in UX and technical domain skills in a
consumer-facing mobile app vs. a developer tool). In general, however, it is
worth noting that product management is a role with a generalist profile —
product managers are expected to fill any gaps not filled by other team members.
For that reason, product managers can’t afford to be really weak in any of the
skills.

What are the essential product management skills, then? These skills fall into five
categories of four skills each:

1. Foundational “human” skills

2. Domain skills
3. Discovery skills
4. Execution skills
5. Leadership skills

Foundational “human” skills

Product management is such a relationship-heavy line of work that human skills
are more important than any domain-specific skills. Of particular importance are
these four foundational skills, without which it is basically impossible to be an
effective product manager:

• Communication
 • Empathy
• Agency
• Ownership

Communication covers communicating effectively, clearly, and concisely in all

channels (e.g., document, message, face to face), employing the most effective
channels. Effective communication requires empathy with the counter-party,
including tailoring the message to the audience. Communication doesn’t refer
just to broadcasting information, it also includes active listening and
understanding what others are communicating.

Empathy means understanding what other people are experiencing from within
their frame of reference and what their needs, problems, and motivations are.
Product managers regularly interact with a variety of other people who product
managers require empathy towards, e.g., stakeholders, team members,
customers, partners, etc.

Ownership includes making and delivering on high-integrity commitments,

following up and not letting tasks slip between the cracks, and doing whatever it
takes to move the product forward and unblock the team. Ownership is first and
foremost a mindset, but it’s also a skill, it requires being organized enough to
make sure that all bases are covered.

Agency refers to being pro-active and driven, exhibiting high resilience, being
tolerant of ambiguity, and finding a way to get results without waiting for
conditions to be perfect or blaming circumstances. It is related to but different
from ownership: ownership means recognizing problems and wanting to address
them, agency means pushing through even in the face of adversity.

Domain skills
Product management is often depicted as the classic Venn diagram showing the
intersection of business, technology, and UX. These are, of course, the functions
that product management frequently interacts with, and having “hard” domain
knowledge in these areas is important for effectiveness as a product manager.
For one thing, product managers need to be able to interact and communicate
with people from these functions without too much friction in “translating”. In
addition, product managers often have to facilitate or make trade-off decisions in
which several of these functional aspects are at odds with each other.

There are different ways to group these domain specific skills. I find the
following grouping useful:

• Customer & industry

• Technology
• Business
• Product & UX

Customer & industry domain skills cover the understanding and making correct
trade-off decisions about the needs and use cases of the customers, as well as
constraints and trends of the industry you are operating in. This includes
industry dynamics (Porter’s Five Forces) as well as applicable rules, regulations,
and other constraints.

Technology domain skills include understanding and making correct trade-off

decisions about the tech stack, key dependencies, and drivers of feasibility and
complexity. Technology skills are helpful to communicate with the engineering
team members, helping identify technical issues, as well as foreseeing technical
challenges.

Business domain skills are about understanding and making correct trade-off
decisions about the business model, go-to-market approach, and competitive
position. Business domain skills are helpful in communing and forging
relationships with stakeholders from the go-to-market side as well as external
stakeholders, for example partners or investors.

Product & UX domain skills refer to understanding the product, the customer and
user experience and its drivers. It means having good product ideas and instincts
on macro (what features to build) and micro level (UI), and making correct trade-
off decisions from a user and customer experience perspective. Product and UX
skills are both general (“product sense”) and specific (knowledge about the
specific product area the product manager is working on).

Discovery skills
Discovery skills are about embracing the uncertainty of product development by
being able to analyze problems and opportunities from a customer and business
perspective, prioritizing them, and validating solution ideas. I like to think about
these four discovery skills:

• Customer discovery
• Metrics & analytics
• Decision making
• Product discovery and validation

Customer discovery skills are about being able to employ the practices and tools
to understand customer needs and identify opportunities to address these needs.
A product manager skilled in customer discovery effortlessly employs tools such
as continuous user interviewing, observational studies, surveys, and desktop
research.

Metrics & analyticsskills refer to understanding and being able to define key
metrics for the product and individual features, as well as hypothesizing metrics
impact of product changes. Product managers skilled in metrics & analytics can
independently access and analyze data through the available tools (e.g., product
analytics, BI, spreadsheets, SQL).

Decision making covers framing ambiguous problems and breaking them apart,
collecting the appropriate amount of relevant information and stakeholder input
to make decisions, and ensuring decisions are made and followed up on in a
timely manner.
Product discovery & validation includes finding and validating the solutions to
the problems identified in customer discovery. Important aspects of the skill are
continuously identifying and validating riskiest assumptions, prioritizing
outcomes over outputs, and understanding and making use of validation tools
(e.g., usability studies, prototype testing, A/B testing).

Execution skills
Execution skills are all about getting things done. For product managers,
execution skills are relevant both in terms of getting their own work done, but
also ensuring that the whole team executes well, and continuously improves
their work processes.

The relevant skills are:

• Focus & prioritization

• Team collaboration
• Delivery process
• Continuous improvement

Focus & prioritizations kills mean the ability to set up and maintain a clear focus
of the product manager’s own work as well as that of the team — doing “fewer
things better”. Product managers that are great in this skill consistently prioritize
their and the team’s time correctly, limit work in progress, and ensure balance in
their and their team’s workload.

Team collaboration skills are of course paramount for product managers:

working effectively with the cross-functional product team, building good and
effective working relationships, involving the whole team in the product
discovery process, and building a culture of psychological safety.

Delivery process skills refer to understanding and effectively playing a part in the
delivery process (e.g., writing specs and tickets, ensuring QA happens, planning,
executing and communicating launches), as well as ensuring team members are
always unblocked. It is worth noting that while there are certain best practices
with regards to delivery processes, they can still vary quite substantially even
among high performing companies.

Continuous improvement means the ability, willingness and drive to identify and
address improvement potential in processes and ways of working. It covers
regularly and effectively running retrospectives and ensuring action items are
implemented, as well as proposing, getting buy-in for and experimenting with
process changes.

Leadership skills
Leadership is an interesting aspect of the product manager role. Product
management is always a leadership role: the product manager’s mandate is to
facilitate the identification of opportunities and then to align the team and
marshal its capacity to capitalize on these opportunities. Product managers
rarely have formal authority, so they have to lean even more strongly on
intellectual and interpersonal leadership skills to get results, including:

• Product direction
• Outcomes and product roadmap
• Stakeholder management
• Feedback & coaching

Product direction skills refer to owning and shaping the product direction
(product vision and strategy), evangelizing the product direction to team and
stakeholders and generating excitement around it. Great product managers are
able to paint a vivid picture of where the product should evolve and then ensure
that the day-to-day work is always linked to this vision.

Objectives and product roadmap skills mean translating product direction into
the work of the product team. These skills include negotiating team objectives,
working with the team to turn opportunities and objectives into feature ideas,
prioritizing opportunities and solutions, and getting buy-in to prioritization and
roadmap.
Stakeholder management means involving, collecting input from and managing
the relationship with stakeholders outside of the product team, and ensuring
stakeholder concerns are taken into account in product decisions.

Feedback & coaching becomes more and more important the more senior a
product manager becomes. It covers feedback to team members, stakeholders,
reports, and managers, coaching and mentoring of junior team members, as well
as providing growth and career development opportunities to junior team
members.