Competency Assessment

To provide guidance toward a long-term career as well as for coaching and developing team members, their tasks, skills, and competencies can be assessed along various dimensions. The following tables depict such a role map as we have been using it for more than a decade. While company-specific aspects need to be added, the role maps below have been anonymized so as not to disclose any confidential information. Still, the overall idea should become clear — specifically how required skills and accountability grow from more junior to more senior positions.

Know the Craft

As the first area of expertise, knowledge about the domain and the product comes top of all. If nothing else, a Product Manager has to know about the market the company is operating in, its customers, and its product offering. Of course, the tools of the PM trade are required, too:

Product Discovery Skills

As a second dimension, understanding the Four Key Risks relevant to product development is key, and, hence, Product Discovery brings several skill requirements:

Product Delivery Skills

After discovery, another set of skills refers to being able to develop ideas and drive the implementation of solutions:

Launching a Product

Finally, when it’s time to release a product or feature, dedicated skills are required to ensure successful roll-out:

Using the Role Map in Career Talks

The PM Role Map is straightforward to use in regular performance reviews:

• To prepare for the career talk, the Product Leader distributes an up-to-date version of the role map and asks every team member for their self-assessment.

• Both the Product Manager and the Product Leader prepare their assessment independently.

• Laying both assessments side-by-side, discrepancies become immediately apparent, and the Product Manager and her manager can discuss opinions, identify gaps, and agree on the next steps to close these gaps.

• For both the employee and her manager, the role map provides a fully transparent tool to discuss promotions and the skills needed for the next step in the career of a Product Manager.

We have been using this model for more than 20 years as leaders in product and technology. Of course, the actual content of the role map may vary. Often, company- or product-specific details will be added, which might easily result in 30-40 aspects to be discussed. This isn’t a problem at all if the role map is not seen as a form that has to be filled out pedantically accurately by both participants — but rather as a tool to align on the assessment and trigger discussions on diverging views or growth areas to focus on.

The above PM Role Map is a tool to coach team members through their careers in Product Management. Sometimes, however, a more visual tool is needed to depict the current state of affairs and maybe also map out how different team members compare against each other — or how a candidate compares a target state, say, when discussing promotions.

For that, we can arrange the exact same competencies as described in the Role Map as a PM Competency 4×4 Wheel:

As can be seen easily, the inner circle reflects exactly the same categories that were used above to group the skills and competencies of Product Managers. At the same time, the outer ring lists the respective skills as explained above.

For example, the following are all part of discovery:

• Market research to learn about market sizes, growth rates, competition, etc.
• Quantitative & qualitative research to learn from user interviews and data
• Prototyping & testing to validate ideas
• And finally, research to ensure business viability

Being more visual than the tables above, the PM Competency 4×4 Wheel allows for some very nice and easy-to-grasp visualizations when comparing a team member against the requirements of the current position — or against those of the next position when a promotion is under discussion:

• Utilize a simplified scale, such as
  • 1 = Cannot do
  • 2 = Can do under supervision
  • 3 = Can do independently
  • 4 = Can guide others
• Rate each of the 16 skills in preparation for the career talk, precisely as described for the PM Role Map above.
• Display the results on a simple radar plot.

Thus, gaps and improvement areas of a Product Manager become immediately visible so that objectives and focus areas for the coming months can be agreed between the Product Manager and her boss.

To benefit from the model the most, we recommend a quarterly cadence of 1:1 performance review meetings, which can be run as follows: