Optimizely’s Product Manager Leveling Framework

What makes a product manager great? Since Ben Horowitz’s famous post on Good PM/Bad PM, plenty of ink has been spilled trying to define our nebulous role. PM is still a new discipline. It’s also constantly evolving, with lots of variation between companies and many ways to succeed even within a single organization.

All that philosophical variety can make it hard to pin down what success actually looks like in the role. Even when things are going well, I’ve always wondered, “am I even doing this right? What am I missing?” Worst of all, the fuzzy definition of a product manager leaves room for unconscious bias in hiring and promotion. If we can’t agree on objective standards for performance, we’ll fall back on favoring people who look and sound like we do — missing out on different and better ways of working in the process.

That’s why I think it’s essential for every product team to define the role in writing, clarifying expectations at every level and using that rubric as a common standard for growing the team. This process isn’t easy, but it’s also a valuable process in its own right for aligning your team, much like writing down your company values.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many good examples out there to start from (shout out to Oscar and XO for blogging their process). In this series, I’ll try to change that by peeling back the curtain on how we evaluate PMs at Optimizely. Credit for defining these roles goes to our fearless leader, Claire Vo, and our whole product team for refining them with practice.

Product Manager I

For each of our PM levels, we start by defining the responsibilities and skillsets we expect — what does this person own, and who do they work with? In this case, we expect a PM to lead a specific product area and influence across ADEPT — the Acronym for our Design, Engineering, and Product Team.

That’s the what, but even more important is the how. It’s important to align on the the core competencies that create these outcomes. This is a statement of our expectations, and also our values. For example, as a company that builds feature flagging and A/B testing for product teams, we have a strong opinion that PMs need to embrace hypothesis thinking and role-model a culture of experimentation. These values manifests in specific behaviors:

We believe that from the first level, great product management have to be collaborative, adaptable decision-makers who drive results through inclusive leadership. These are empty, feel-good words on their own — who doesn’t want to be collaborative? — but by translating them into concrete behaviors we can each measure our progress and identify areas for improvement. We operationalize these values by reviewing these levels in 1:1s and promotion discussions. Here’s how a fictional PM’s performance evaluation might look:

In this case, we have a PM who’s come to the role with strong communication skills, a collaborative attitude, and a growth mindset. But they haven’t yet solidified their understanding of our users enough to communicate a compelling vision or support their teammates. Without that mastery and a track record of consistent execution, they risk losing the trust of their team — the surest way to fail as a PM.

These behaviors become a map to becoming a stronger PM. With deliberate effort, you can demonstrate competence and learn new skills to excel at this level and propel you to the next.

Product Manager II

In a nutshell, a PM II has mastered the skills from the previous section and can operate autonomously, without much help or hand-holding. We trust them to own a business-critical part of the product, and they’re sought out for their expertise. They hone that expertise through constant interactions with customers (multiple times every week), marinating in data, and constant experimentation to validate new concepts.

We’ll typically promote a PM to this level once they’ve demonstrated most of the competencies of the previous section, plus they’re already showing some strengths at the next level. In general, our goal isn’t to make someone “check every box”, but rather to show a broad grasp of 80%+ of these skills plus at least one or two “superpowers” at the next level. We also expect consistency, which means we want to see people performing at the next level for around 6 months before they’re promoted. For external hires, we’ll similarly look for a few years of experience in similar roles, but some new skills they bring that level up our team. The expectations at this level are significantly higher:

Note that we use the same high-level categories, but raise the bar in each. The common thread is greater autonomy and broader influence:

• Building systems and repeatable processes. They’re force multipliers for their teams, not individual heroes. They’re accountable for consistent delivery on a team, not just their own output.
• Role modeling and mentoring beyond their individual projects. They have to make the whole product team more effective. And they have to be versatile, exercising leadership on a variety of products and areas.
• Initiating new projects rather than executing tasks handed down from above. This requires forming strong opinions, evangelizing a vision, and executing with urgency across disciplines.

Senior Product Manager

Advancing to Senior PM is a major career milestone representing years of effort. This is a cross-functional leadership role. Beyond responsibility for one or more teams, we expect Senior PMs to lead initiatives that span the entire company, from sales and marketing to customer success and finance. They’re business leaders rather than just technical product owners, and we count on them to juggle multiple larger initiatives with consistent and measurable impact.

As an experimentation company, we care a lot about measuring impact of product initiatives. We strive to avoid a feature factory mentality, where teams ship a lot of code without understanding their impact on outcomes. Our Senior PMs are the critical link between our high-level vision and strategy — “build the world’s leading experimentation platform for product and marketing teams” —and the design and engineering work needed to achieve that vision. They don’t just deeply understand our customers’ needs, they build systems for keeping their teams in constant alignment with those needs. They’re ruthless prioritizers, broad influencers, and champions of diverse thinking across their teams. They ensure that every new feature we build starts with a measurable outcome — adoption, retention, etc. — and we hold them accountable for achieving those outcomes. Not an easy job!

Now it’s your turn

We hope you’ll share our approach with your team and adapt it for your own situation. Click here for a slide version you can read, copy, and tweak.

We’d love your feedback! How does your team define success? What are our blindspots?

And if you like the sound of our values, we’re hiring for PMs, engineers, and more 😉