Optimize your Team, Not your Product
It’s easy to admire a product and try to unravel how such a solution came to life.
The numerous customer interviews, market analysis, and deep discovery that surfaced an unresolved problem. The rapid prototyping, testing and infinite iterations threaded together with just enough validation to continue. These are the anecdotes and lessons we seek out for reuse in our own product process.
The process, of course, is what brought the product to life, but it was the people who determined that process. Products are simply the byproduct of the people who build them. Optimize your team and you’ll in turn optimize their output, your product.
There are arguably hundreds of important skills to optimize for when hiring a great Product Manager but few frameworks for guidance. I needed a way to capture and prioritize the product management skills that matter most to our product team and organize those to guide the growth of product managers.
My Objectives:
- Identify and hire the right Product Managers
- Objective guidance for career growth
I started with a similar format developed by Brent Tworetzky in his post Product Manager Skills by Seniority Level, starting with a long list of skills and a set of PM tiers. However, I found that hard to communicate and thus blended it with a visual of PM tiers by Impact that we developed at Typeform. The 2 formats complimented each other nicely.
With a format in place, I added the skills and weight to match the needs for our product organization.
Product Management Skill Categories
The 6 skill categories by role are described visually with levels of expertise/experience represented by pie charts for relative measure. Some are stronger in areas than others thus achievement of a tier is therefore not based on a single skill but on sustained performance across all categories in a row.
Product Management Skills Examples
The 6 skill categories are further supported by more granular, measurable skill examples to lend weight to a category. The examples show the skill in practice and are related by tier to show the importance to the product organization.
Leadership & Influence
Successfully leading teams through highly complex situations and growing people along the way.
Communication
Clear verbal and documented communication to large and high stakes audiences (internal and external).
Strategic Expertise
Ability to arrive at solutions for increasingly large problems and product areas, with corresponding internal thought leadership and high business IQ.
Hard Skills
Understanding and applying functional disciplines (Engineering, Design, UX, data) in order to partner well across the organization.
Details & Delivery
Consistently driving results on-time, and with an attention to detail across increasing scope and ambiguity.
Collaboration
Effectively working across a myriad of individuals and teams to get things done.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all PM or short-list of the most important skills. They differ by organization and product. Based on the type of product organization you intend to build, you can define your own skill categories and examples or give relative importance (via tiers) to each of the existing skill examples above.
Determining the type of Product Managers you need will determine your product more than anything else.
