Competency

Example

0 None

You’ve never been involved in any kind of user research. Your experience has been focused on delivery, not user-centred outcomes.

1 Beginner

You’ve worked in a team that talks about their users and tries to create products for them, but you’ve not really been involved in understanding them. You’re starting to understand and experience different sets of data, quantitative and qualitative, you can draw upon to understand new and existing users.

2 Adv. Beginner

You’ve started to identify ways to understand both the total market of potential users and the discreet addressable market of who you’re really targeting. There are other sources that will help you understand users and you’ve started using them. Perhaps you’ve made some decisions based on either qualitative or quantitative user data from your existing users.

3 Competent

For existing users you can articulate who they are, their needs and pain points. For potential users you use market segmentation and have experience with behavioural, demographic, psychographic or geographic segmentation. You’re comfortable making decisions using qualitative or quantitative data and you’re well on your way to becoming the company-acknowledged expert on your users.

4 Advanced

Perhaps you’ve entered into the Product Manager role from a marketing, social science or user research background so you have an extra lens on users. You know the benefits of different research methods, the contexts in which they’re best applied and are capable of working with Teams that provide this or carrying out this work yourself.

5 Expert

You’re an acknowledged expert in the field of market and user research. You can riff on all methods and when they’re best used. You might have led the Product Insights team and you’re definitely coaching others because of how deep your knowledge and experience is.

Competency

Example

0 None

You’re completely new to your company’s industry.

1 Beginner

You’ve been at the company long enough to garner some basic understanding of your industry, but you don’t know much outside of what you’ve been told internally.

2 Adv. Beginner

You have a basic understanding of your main competitors and how you’re positioned. You’ve started to regularly read what’s going on in your space and have starting using this knowledge in your discussions and decisions. If you don’t have access to people who do product marketing activities such as market sizing and segmentation, you should start getting a grip on this.

3 Competent

You know enough about the industry you’re in to confidently hold your own in the company and your team. Your knowledge is good enough to adequately lead your product team and bring market context into conversations. You know who your main competitors are, how your product is positioned against theirs, and you have a solid grip on market dynamics and trends .

4 Advanced

People come to you because you know a LOT about this industry and they can learn from you. You might have some specialist knowledge that few have. You deeply understand competitors, their unique value propositions and how your product is positioned against them. You have strong opinions on where the industry is going, backed by experience, data and insights and can use these to actively shape product strategy.

5 Expert

You’ve worked most of your career in this space. You know pretty much everything there is to know in this space and if you weren’t a PM, you could probably work as a industry expert consulting to companies in the industry.

Competency

Example

0 None

You’re probably brand new to the company. Either that, or your onboarding process as a new employee was ... lacking.

1 Beginner

You have a basic understanding of why the company exists and perhaps where it wants to be. You’ve been onboarded into some basic definition of company strategy and perhaps you’ve seen an org chart. You should have been exposed to the company’s key metrics or KPIs.

2 Adv. Beginner

You’ve started to build some relationships with different departments that you can collaborate with in order to succeed with your product, e.g. marketing, customer service. You have a better understanding of the short and long term goals of the company and the business metrics your product needs to strive for.

3 Competent

You know your stakeholders and how important they are to your product. Your product strategy aligns to the goals of the business and you make sure you stay aligned. You can confidently give this context to your team and justify how product decisions relate back to the business. You understand the business model, cost and revenue drivers, and you’re across key product metrics and can map these back to business goals.

4 Advanced

You’ve built amazing relationships in the company and people regularly come to you to learn about the business, its strategy or who to speak to if they need something. You’re capable of inputting into higher tier company strategy discussions and go outside the realm of your local context. You’re deep in the business model and across key metrics such as value or impact.

5 Expert

You’re a founder / one of the earliest employees, or a massively seasoned veteran of the company. Perhaps you’ve worked your way through a bunch of departments and know how the company works intimately well. There’s not much you don’t know about the business, its strategy and how it works.

Competency

Example

0 None

Hey everyone, I’m new here. Can you teach me how this thing works?

1 Beginner

You’ve taken some time with key people to understand how the product works and you’ve spent a little bit of time using it yourself. You’re starting to get yourself across all aspects of the product including its proposition, feature set and compliance or governance requirements.

2 Adv. Beginner

You know the product pretty well and have progressed to learning a broader range of topics about the product, like how it works from a technical and UX perspective. You recognise there are ethical decisions that need to be considered, personally and socially. You could train a new customer on how to successfully use the product.

3 Competent

Most of the time you know the answer to a question about the product. Demo’ing to a prospective customer or handling live support queries wouldn’t be a problem. You can speak to its relative state from a business model, ethics, UX, and tech perspective. You’ve been in enough discussions and have made enough decisions to feel confident leading it, because you know it.

4 Advanced

Either you’ve worked on the product for quite some time and can riff on its history and tales of success and failure from many perspectives. Or perhaps you used to work as an engineer, designer or BA on the product and now you’re not only super deep in that area, but you’re also fully competent (level 3) everywhere else.

5 Expert

You’ve either worked on it so long that there isn’t much you don’t know about the product, or you were pretty much there from the beginning and designed it in the early days. No-one knows more about this product than you do.

Competency

Example

0 None

You’re completely new to working with product teams, or you’ve only worked on waterfall projects that deliver a specification. Budget, time or scope has been your language.

1 Beginner

You’re either mildly capable of delivering increments of a product in an iterative way, or you’ve only ever worked with testing prototypes. Either way, you’re really at the beginning of your agile / product journey. Familiarity with popular frameworks and a modern PM mindset is developing.

2 Adv. Beginner

You’re competent in delivery or discovery, but still new to the idea of balancing them. You might be competent working Scrum, but you’ve just experienced a design sprint. Whilst your focus is discovery, you understand the importance of a supporting role in delivery and to the engineers, as well as the importance of engaging with other areas e.g. go-to-market, customer service and operations.

3 Competent

You can juggle product discovery with delivering validated solutions in a quality fashion. You’re comfortable working with UX designers, researchers and stakeholders to groom and prioritise the backlog, ensuring only validated solutions make it into the product. You’re confident in saying no and articulating why. You dig into usage data and analyse metrics you’re trying to move, and formulate hypotheses to gradually improve the product. You’ve developed a profound understanding and use of product frameworks and embody a modern PM mindset.

4 Advanced

You’re capable of leading & facilitating discovery sprints. You know when to innovate, when to iterate and when to optimise. You’re adept at balancing competing interests and co-ordinating key decisions. People come to you for advice, you mentor PM’s or PO’s, you are truly able to educate more than just product people on the PM mindset and overarching product process.

5 Expert

You’re an expert in the field and regularly give public talks on new or innovative ways to balance discovery, delivery and operations. Maybe you’ve written a book. Maybe you’re Jeff Patton, Melissa Perri or Marty Cagan. If so, wow! Hi … we’re big fans of your work :)

Competency

Example

0 None

Maybe you’ve only ever worked executing someone else’s product strategy. What’s an OKR?

1 Beginner

You’re able to piece together a basic product vision statement and have an emerging sense of why we’re here, what’s important to the team & stakeholders. How that translates into steps towards that product vision, you’re not really sure.

2 Adv. Beginner

Your team has a product vision, you articulate outcome-based goals and have basic metrics in place to help your team make good decisions. You understand the strategic relationship between your product and other stakeholders. You know the needs and pains of those stakeholders and know how to manage their requests honestly and transparently. You are an evangelist for the product.

3 Competent

You regularly analyse all the various internal (company) and external (market) signals and trends in order to create a dynamic product strategy that articulates the reasoning behind your goals and roadmap. You’ve got structures in place (e.g. quarterly OKRs) that define and track strategic goals. You have an understanding of your product’s lifecycle and can make the difficult decision to retire a product or feature.

4 Advanced

People come to you to help them design compelling product strategies that encompass all the various dimensions of shipping a great product, outside just the product itself e.g. position, pricing, go-to-market, product ops, support. Perhaps you coach and mentor other PMs, or work at a group / portfolio level and can create strategy outside of your direct influence.

5 Expert

You participate at senior levels of the business because of your strategic prowess. You might not be great at writing user stories, but you’re a legend on product strategy.

Competency

Example

0 None

Regardless of formal titles and responsibilities, you’ve never led people before.

1 Beginner

Perhaps you’ve worked in a team where you’ve occasionally stepped up and provided direction. You’ve probably seen good and bad leadership and have some early opinions and observations on what this could mean.

2 Adv. Beginner

You’re starting to learn what it means to be a leader, how to influence, motivate and inspire people. You know that internal self-awareness is what differentiates great leaders from the rest. Perhaps you’ve had some experience providing direction to a team or have supported a team member in their growth.

3 Competent

You’re aware of different kinds of situational leadership, what intrinsically motivates people and regularly communicate in a way that inspires your team to think for themselves. You have mechanisms in place to get behavioural feedback from your peers and practise active listening. When leading, you consider your duty of care to those around you, your users, society, and the environment. You are both mentoring and actively managing product folk.

4 Advanced

You’re a seasoned manager of people or teams and know how to actively grow people. You’re a specialist in certain kinds of leadership and can help new PM’s (or anyone for that matter) learn how to be a better leader. There’s an art to listening and you’re a master at it because you’re deeply self aware. You enable and empower as opposed to telling or instructing. Humility is a word you love.

5 Expert

You’ve been leading and coaching people and teams for a long time and regardless of what you’re doing, you know intimately well how get the best out of people. People naturally follow you and want to learn how to lead like you. You inspire everyone around you and could educate others on what great leadership looks like. You inspire trust and people keep choosing you as the one they want to work with. You should write a book :)

Competency

Example

0 None

You’ve never worked in a team before, you’ve been a lone wolf! The main success you care about is your own.

1 Beginner

You’ve started to learn the importance of valuing the team & company’s success over your own, though most of your experience has been in top-down, command and control environments where people are told what to do. You’re starting to let go of the need to be in control, but it’s just the beginning.

2 Adv. Beginner

You value the long term success of your team over short term wins. You share information openly and honestly. You’ve also learned how to adjust your planning around dependencies to other teams and you’ve got the basics of Agile collaboration down pat.

3 Competent

You’re able to make challenging priority decisions that are in the best interests of your company. This might mean prioritising another team’s interests over your own, for the greater good. You’re capable of launching an initiative even if it transcends the scope of your team, because the impact is what’s important. You’re solid at creative safe happy team environments.

4 Advanced

You’re capable of leading organisation-wide initiatives that rely on many teams contributing and collaborating. This is very difficult and requires a blend of skills like project management and Agile leadership along with being able to “see and sense the whole”. This happens because of your approachable nature, strong relationships you nurture across the organisation and your ability to leverage collective intelligence.

5 Expert

Your company relies on you to drive company-wide initiatives because you’re great at execution and you embody what Agile is all about - adaptation, trust and relationships. You’re able to lead highly complex initiatives with many competing interests by building strong relationships, being in tune with the reality on the ground and bringing the right people together to solve problems collaboratively. You are a diplomat in the truest, most positive sense of the word. Ever considered joining the United Nations?

Change Log

Changes

Who

Version

04 March 2022

• Grammatical improvements
• Change log added
• Reviewed Decoding Product Management — A skill matrix to grow, coach, assess, and hire world-class PMs - Markus Muller and incorporated minor improvements. https://medium.com/@markusmuller89/decoding-product-management-a-skill-matrix-to-grow-coach-assess-and-hire-world-class-pms-a385a4476866

Sandra Davey

v1-3

27 April 2021

• Minor improvements
• Remove Product Space brand and replace with Organa brand (same company new name)

Brendan Marsh

v1-2

11 February 2021

Minor improvements

Brendan Marsh

v1-1

04 February 2020

Original

Sandra Davey

Brendan Marsh

v1-0