Product Management isn’t the same at every company. Different orgs, product types, and team structures lead to confusion about what skills a Product Manager should actually have. When I was learning the craft, I struggled with this myself — and later, as a leader, I wanted a way to clearly articulate the full spectrum of product capabilities.

To address this, I developed a Product Competencies Framework — a map of the core skills that effective Product Managers need. This framework doesn’t assume every PM must excel at everything. Rather, it provides a way to visualize the range of skills, Evaluate team strengths/gaps, and support coaching and team development.

The Product Competencies framework describes all of the skills commonly associated with Product Management.  It does not assume every PM should be able to do all of these things, but it provides a way to think about what an individual PM should be good at, if they want to focus in one direction or another.  It also provides a map for considering how to balance out a team, making it easy to see if you’re heavy on certain skills but have gaps in other areas on your team.

Junior Product Managers tend to focus more at the bottom of this chart whereas senior PMs who are thinking strategically, are operating in the upper part of the chart (especially team leads, Directors).  Technical PMs who work on internal tools and platforms, are generally focused on the right side, whereas consumer facing products on the left.  From this, you could derive the quadrant where each PM should be focused (eg upper-left for a senior B2C PM, lower right for a junior internal tools PM).

Team Assessment

This model can be useful for evaluating, communicating, and improving the overall capabilities of your team. It can also be used to think through skills gaps on the team or what type of PM is needed for a given type of product role that you’re hiring for. For example, if your team is lacking in external market strategy, the model might be drawn as follows, and this makes it easy to illustrate where the deficiencies are that a team can rally around in the coming year.

Product Management is broad and context-dependent, but a structured competency map helps teams articulate expectations, evaluate skills, and grow capability over time. A balanced product team in which members complement each other and the necessary skills are represented,  can ensure product team success, across the product portfolio.