From the beginning

Umberto Eco once wrote a book about a man stuck on an island who cannot swim. He later said that part of the difficulty in writing the book was unlearning how to swim and then learning it back again. It’s the same with products I’ve worked on. I have to remember the starting point long after the product has gone out into the world and found its own destiny. From the starting point, I have to reconstruct how the product came to life. What shaped its origins? What were the key constraints? And at that starting point there is another important consideration: what lens am I looking through? The lens gives focus to what is important and what can be left to one side. For the last few years, it’s been the either product manager or someone associated with that function; maybe their manager or an executive trying to understand product management.

Tonight, on my walk, I dissected building the individual skills assessment. This questionnaire gives product managers feedback on what skills they have and what skills they need to work on. When I was first asked to create this product, someone showed me a spreadsheet full of questions. I looked down the list. If I asked a product manager to answer them, I’d get answers, but they wouldn’t get what they wanted out of it. This list was one of ‘well, it would be really good if product managers could do this.” I wanted something more defensible; something with more intellectual rigor. In most subjects there are theoretical underpinnings.  After a bit of research, I uncovered behavioral indicators. The goal became to link behaviors with skills which led to career success. Then I could rewrite the questions to highlight behaviors and reorganize them. The end result was a list organized around 15 competencies.

·        Strategy

·        Market Research

·        Competitive Analysis

·        Pricing

·        Forecasting

·        End of Life

·        Business Skills

·        Domain Knowledge

·        Marketing and Launch

·        Requirements

·        Communication

·        Management

·        Customer Understanding and Knowledge

·        Product Management Process

·        Leadership

Product managers could have a clear list of topics they were good at and topics they needed more work on. It provided them with a template for career growth. It gave them a talking point with their managers so that they knew what support they needed to grow.

Putting a growth perspective on this product, the skills report each product manager received was key. For each skill and for each level within that skill, I had to remain positive. Even if market research was a key skill and you had no experience, the blurb in the report had to encourage product managers towards growth. And if you were the most experienced product manager with decades of deep market research experience, in what way could you still grow?

Later on, one of the consultants took it even further. He developed a way to compare what the manager wanted with what the product manager thought their skill level was. And interestingly, when the assessment was given to product managers and managers, with a 6-month gap and training in between, the areas for improvement were addressed and often went from being below par to exceeding the manager’s expectations.

In the end over 4000 people have taken the assessment. 280 Group created a report which collated the first 1600+ responses and gave an overview of those skills which product managers were generally good and those which seemed to become stronger later in their careers.

And me? I still remember looking down at that first sheet of questions thinking: what on earth am I going to do with this???