Product management skills mapping
I love it when you take two independent ideas and combine them to come up with something completely different.
In this case, the initial idea came from an England training camp that I attended some time ago. They had created a radial chart that maps out the skill levels of an international player. This included speed, fitness, agility, passing, etc., with each skill a slice of the chart. The idea is to measure where you are, compared to where you should be.
I thought it was brilliant. It helped identify the core skills for my position, and what level I should be at. This helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses. I then focused my training on improving on my weaknesses, while maintaining my strengths.
It made me think about how I could apply this to product management. As someone who loves coaching product managers, how could I apply the same idea to help others identify their strengths and weaknesses in the same way?
The first challenge was to identify the core skills for product management. As it happens, at that time I was reading ‘Empowered’ by Marty Cagan. In there he described the core skills required for product management. He starts with the three pillars: People Skills, Process Skills and Product Knowledge. Within each of these pillars, he breaks them down into more specific skills. Those include user and customer knowledge, product delivery, and stakeholder collaboration skills.
There are 13 in total and when I overlaid them onto a radial chart, I got exactly what I was looking for.
The next challenge is to identify the skill level for each of the 13 skills. These numbers will vary by role. For example, a Product Director will need a higher score for leadership and business strategy than a Product Manager. The numbers will also vary by organisation and the type of product support they have. For example, a Product Manager that has ProdOps support won’t necessarily require the same skill level in this field as a Product Manager who has to do this themselves.
You then map these scores out on the chart, as can be seen in the example.
The next step is to discuss with your product manager to assess how they compare to the above expectations for their role. This will help them identify their strengths and weaknesses, providing clear guidelines on areas for improvement. To see how this works, let’s look at the below example. The PM is performing well for User and Customer knowledge, ProdOps, Product Delivery and Stakeholder Collaboration. However, there are areas for improvement, which include Industry and Company Knowledge, Product Discovery and Evangelism. Armed with this information you can both come up with a plan to improve in those areas. Over time you should see an improvement, as long as you keep tracking and having those meaningful discussions.
Product Manager Skills Mapping
