Product Team Competencies

I’ve always found the discipline of Product Management to be lacking in formal definition, beyond mere hyperbole and rhetoric. When I was a Product Manager learning the craft, this left something to be desired as I wanted to ensure I was focusing on the right skills. Later, as I begin to lead other Product Managers, I again revisited this desire for something a little more straight-forward so that I could coach those Product Managers in the growth of their career, beyond what our own company’s definition of Product might be.

At some point, I discovered a few frameworks out there, but none of them felt like they thoroughly answered the need to account for the key skills of Product Management, particularly those working in the digital arena. And so to that end, I created one:

With this framework, I do not assume that every  Product Manager should have all of these skills. Rather, I see this as a 2-dimensional spectrum of competencies and Product Managers will naturally place somewhere onto this grid (strategic vs tactical, and external vs internal).

Generally speaking, junior Product Managers whose day-to-day centers around the “heads down” Product Owner work for their scrum team will likely be strong in the bottom half of the skills, and if they’re working on a B2C product that likely leans to the bottom-left. An internal tools Product Manager likely skews to the bottom-right. Conversely, more senior product leaders will generally be “heads up” and focusing on the top half, focusing on strategy. Again, however, consumer-facing product leaders will generally skew to the upper-left, whereas technical product leaders will focus in the upper right.

Orthogonal Competencies

There are several reasons why Product Management is a little different for everyone. Part of it has to do with seniority (heads up vs heads down). Another part of it is whether the Product Manager is working on B2C, B2B, or technical products. Yet another reason is that Product tends to act as the “glue” for their teams since we own the outcome of our product and to that end, we tend to fill the gaps of our organization and that often means taking on additional roles and responsibilities beyond what is truly Product Management.

Perhaps the most common orthogonal skill Product Managers must pick up, is that of the Project Manager. Particularly in the Product Owner capacity, it is far too easy (and sometimes necessary) for Product Managers to act as the coordinator for their team. Unfortunately, there is no end to the amount of coordination work that is needed and ‘urgent’ often takes priority over ‘important’, which means the Product Manager can end up spending less and less time on actual Product work if they’re not careful. Other skills that are sometimes adopted to fill a gap are UX and Analytics, Product Operations, Product Marketing.

Product Team Assessment

This model can be useful for evaluating, communicating, and improving the overall capabilities of your team. For example, if your team is lacking in external market strategy, the model might be drawn as following, and this makes it easy to illustrate where the deficiencies are that a team can rally around in the coming year.

Individual Skill Assessment

I’ve found the above framework to be rather helpful in helping my team to see the full spectrum of Product Management skills. Taking it a step further, I also find it useful to sketch out the part of the spectrum that I see the Product Managers on the team excelling at. This is a fantastic exercise for me to recognize their strengths as well as their opportunities for improvement. This allows me as a leader to put people into areas that tap into their strengths, as well as to have a conversation with them about where they want to go and begin to identify the missing skills they’ll need to get there. For me, this is a fantastic exercise that sets the stage for a lot more effective career growth coaching and team development.