How We Develop Product Managers at GOGOVAN
The continuous assessment process for our product team
When it comes to scaling up product teams, companies are often focused on outward-facing activities, like hiring more product managers to cover new strategic areas or looking for outside candidates who had experience solving the team’s latest problems. But while fresh eyes help to bring a new perspective, it is equally important to upskill the existing product managers so they are competent to take on greater challenges and create more value for the company.
As product management legend, Marty Cagan, mentioned, the performance and efficiency of a cross-functional product team (product, design, engineering, QA and data) are highly correlated with the ability of its product manager. Thus, a stagnant product manager is the last thing you want on your team. And continuous professional development is an integral part of staving off stagnation.
Marty summarizes product manager competence as:
Having deep knowledge of your users and customers, deep knowledge of the data that’s generated about your product, deep knowledge of your industry, and deep knowledge of how your business works.
So how should leaders help their product managers reach up to that standard in their already busy schedule?
Apply a product lens to PM’s career development
At GOGOVAN, we try to solve this problem by applying the same approach to our PM’s personal development as we would to product problems.
We start by:
- Discovering their career goals
(e.g. why do they want to become PMs and what are their goals?) - Defining their success criteria
(e.g. what kind of PM they want to become?) - Identifying gaps and opportunities
(e.g. what are their strengths and weaknesses?) - Setting strategic priorities
(e.g. where do they want to be in 6 months and what are the blockers?) - Building a roadmap for execution
(e.g. how do they get to the destination?)
Always start with why
If you don’t know where you’re going, you will never know whether you are on track to meet your goals. Thus we want to first figure out if the PM role is actually right for the team members and which internal opportunity is more aligned with the stage of their career development.
Are they doing it because of all the wrong reasons?
- Want to become the CEO of a product
- Want to make all the product decisions by themselves
- Want to design all the coolest features by themselves
Or they are doing it because they are driven by:
- Building world-class products with a variety of people
- Driving business growth and making impacts
- Solving challenging problems for users
And what is their expected career progression timeline?
- Becoming a people manager in X years
- Further developing his/her skills as an individual contributor
- Still feeling torn between the two options
With answers to all these questions, we can define the “north star” for the PM and tailor-make our coaching and training approaches accordingly.
Every PM is different
In professional development, there is a constant debate over whether people should focus on developing their strengths or improving their weaknesses. Our product managers, however, don’t have to struggle between the two approaches because we want them to focus on both :)
One of the most important things we’ve come to understand is that PMs help the company reduce technology risk through a holistic view of the whole product experience (Customer x Business x Technology). If they have major blind spots in any of these three elements, even with the help of designers and engineers, the final result is very likely to be a failure.
That’s why we’re strongly opinionated that there are certain baseline knowledge plus communication skills that our PMs must acquire in order to collaborate well with our entire development team.
Having said that, this doesn’t mean we want them to be a “jack of all trades, master of none” generalist. After picking up the basics, we generally encourage PMs to follow the career advice of Keith Rabois, ex COO at Square:
“Aim to become not the best at what you do but “the only one” who does what you do, and figure out how to define that.”
To put it another way, we want them to develop a unique positioning so they will gradually become a T-shaped or, even better, M-shaped PM who has expertise in one or multiple domain areas and a broad base of general supporting knowledge/skills.
For example, they could be PMs:
- Specialized in building products in 2-sided marketplaces and SaaS
- Experienced in finding product/market fit and solving problems in growth
- Mastered the art of global expansion and storytelling
The possibilities are endless here. We just need to work with the PM to pick and further develop the right superpower that can bring the biggest impact to the team and benefit their future career at the same time.
Below are a few popular product management career development frameworks that can make this decision easier:
- Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Google, Twitter)
- Brandon Chu (Shopify)
- Marty Cagan (SVPG, Netscape, eBay)
Assess their current position
After figuring out the WHY and WHAT, we need to be fully aware of the PM’s current abilities before giving any advice. Yet it’s easier said than done. Research suggests that while 95% of people think they’re self-aware, only ~10% of them really do. So how do we help PMs actively improve their internal and external self-awareness?
In trying to objectively assess where they are, we find it useful to use 360° reviews (twice a year) and PM skill scorecards to provide frequent feedback on their gaps and opportunities so we know HOW to adjust the course along the way.
Similar to typical 360° reviews, ours include a self-review, manager review, peer review, and upward feedback. All of these fit into a continuous review process that includes a bi-weekly/monthly one-on-one check-in, OKRs update, and professional development discussion. The check-in ensures that both managers and PMs can provide one another with valuable feedback on a regular basis.
In order to make the career development discussion less abstract, we’ve also created a unique PM skills scorecard (see below) to break a large topic into smaller pieces, making it easier to pinpoint what went well and what could be improved.
(Note: here’s the Google Doc version of the scorecard for your easy reference.)
The upper portion of the scorecard summarizes our expectations of the PM e.g. their current superpower, high-level feedback, potential next role, expected timeline to next level…etc.
Then the middle part shows all the key weighted attributes that we want the PM to develop. They are divided into four categories based on the key elements of our product process:
- Product Discovery
- Product Delivery
- Communication
- Culture
- Individual skills
The manager and the PM herself have to score them twice a year. When comparing scores, they should find a significant overlap. This step confirms both people are prioritizing the same skills and the PM has a reasonable self-awareness. If the scores diverge significantly, it’s time for them to reassess, coalesce and articulate the priorities of the PM’s professional development plan.
Grow with intention
Finally, in the last part of the scorecard, we like to identify two professional development areas to focus on for every review cycle. The areas will be determined by the career milestone the PM wants to achieve in the next six months. Does she want to double down on what she’s already good at, address one of her key weaknesses or adopt a new skill?
Every leader knows how tempting it is to jump in and decide these development areas from top-down. However, if you don’t give your team members a say on their own career decisions, how are they ever going to grow? In our experience, the most effective way is to use a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Providing guidance along the way and giving them a voice to build a sense of ownership and accountability.
The ultimate goal is to make sure the PM has clear action items to work on improving her skills on a daily/weekly basis. This also creates concrete discussion topics for the manager and PM to go through during their regular 1:1s. Is the team member going in the right direction? Are there any blockers that the PM doesn’t know how to handle? Does the manager need to provide additional resources to speed up the progress?
After repeating this cycle a few times, the PM will be able to see a steady personal growth trajectory in this scorecard, which becomes their professional growth roadmap. The personal growth path also creates a proxy for the manager to understand whether the PM is ready for new challenges and opportunities.
Closing thoughts
The PM’s continuous assessment process likes ours is a good way to set the tone and tell the entire product organization what kind of culture you want to establish. Therefore, you want to carefully design the process and develop your PMs with intention, rather than by chance.
Similar to building great products, developing PMs require you to think big, define success, set priorities, start small and iterate fast.
It is going to take some work for sure, but we can almost guarantee you the outcome is worth it.
References
Our process and scorecard are inspired by
- Developing Strong Product Managers by Marty Cagan (SVPG)
- Coaching Tools — The Assessment by Marty Cagan (SVPG)
- The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager by Lenny Rachitsky (ex Airbnb)
- Becoming an Effective Product Management Leader by Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, ex Twitter, Google, Yahoo)
If you are interested in using technology to transform the last mile in logistics, we are actively hiring new talents to join our analytics, design, engineering and product teams. Check out our careers page for details.
