Product manager skills professional#

Either lacks basic skills or behaviour not in line with basic expectations.Inspired partly by the McKinsey model and partly by the Expert Roadmap by Luciano Passuello at Litemind, we created a scale from 1 to 7, with descriptions at levels 1, 3, 5, and 7. To get a way to align what different levels mean across widely varying skills and behaviours, it is worthwhile to have a somewhat unified yardstick. The leadership dimensions covered are: Customer, Marketing, Product, Design, Tech, Analytical, People, and Process leadership - below you can see a summary of the dimensions and the skills across each:Ĭompetency Levels and Ways To Develop High-level competency level descriptions Therefore to emphasize that leadership will have to be a central theme for a product manager, we have seen all dimensions as different aspects of leadership (this is also similar to the competency matrix used at McKinsey). The Leadership DimensionsĪs the product manager has very limited hard power. As you can imagine, this is quite comprehensive, let's dig into it. For each skill, there are then a couple descriptions of what behaviour typically looks like across different levels. The competency matrix is based on 8 leadership dimensions, with a couple of skills and behaviours in each dimension. In fact the competency matrix is intended to cover pretty much all the skills needed to run a SaaS company, but since the PM plays such a central role, we find it works really well as a cheat sheet for PMs, and since PMs come from such varied backgrounds, this approach also allows PMs with adjacent strengths to shine. Competency Matrix for Product Manager Skillsīefore moving in to the competency matrix itself, we'd like to give a shout-out to three people who were immensely helpful as we developed it: Jens-Fabian Goetzmann (Head of Product at RevenueCat, and PM thought leader at ), Kina Liungman (former Chief People and Performance Officer at Hedvig), Dominic von Martens (Founder at SelfLeaders). The program as a whole has 11 building blocks, and the competency matrix is one of those blocks, one that many of the other blocks rely heavily on.īoth the program and the competency matrix has its foundation in our company values and context, but we believe it to be applicable for any product-led company.

Product manager skills professional#

At Delibr we do this with trust-based autonomy, clarity and consistent iteration of our purpose, and not least by making sure that everyone on the team can achieve mastery.Īs our mission at Delibr, we have set out to “Turn dreamers into changemakers” and in line with that we called our Professional Development Program the Changemaker Program. The road to success is to genuinely engage all team members. Part of a Professional Development ProgramĪ competency matrix as a stand-alone artefact does little impact, but if it is embedded into the way a company works with developing its people, it can have a lot of impact. In the spirit of contributing to the community, we'd like to share our work on this. We did this as part of our work on professional development, the Delibr changemaker program. We thought so, and so we set out to create a Competency Matrix for Product Managers. Wouldn't it be useful with a detailed split of the different skills and behaviours required by product managers, with descriptions of what different levels of performance looks like? Their competency matrix is called the Engagement Performance Review (EPR), and all consultants up to partner level are scored across the dimensions for every major project they are part of, i.e.

Across different leadership dimensions, it describes what skills and behaviours look like at different levels. All of the above also applies to another industry that has had more time to adapt to it: management consulting.Īs a tool to handle a similar situation, McKinsey & Company has long worked with a detailed competency matrix. As the role has limited hard authority, leadership becomes a central theme. This is complicated as the role requires many different and varied skills.

It is important to create clarity on expectations for the role. Often ambitious junior people come into a role that is a stretch for their current skills. Developing people for the product manager role is hard.