Your Product Management Competence Map + Skills Assessment

 

In today’s newsletter:

1. Product Management Competence Map

2. Competencies by Product Role

3. Product Management Skills Assessment

4. Competence Map to Download

5. Next Steps

So, grab a coffee and let's dive in!

1. Product Management Competence Map

I’ve broken down Product Management into eight categories:

Next, I’ll dive into what you need to know and share recommended resources.

1.1 Business and Strategy

Strategy is a set of choices that help you win in your chosen market. It defines the vision, market, value proposition, tradeoffs, and growth model, among others. It should be hard for competitors to copy.

You should understand:

• What strategy is, and what it's not.

• Models like SWOT, PESTLE, and Porter's Five Forces.

• Market size metrics like TAM, SAM, and SOM.

• How to make a business model to outline how your company will make money. This is often done with Business Model Canvas or Lean Model Canvas.

• 1.2 Execution

Execution is the stage where strategy turns into action.

You should understand:

• Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for setting goals and measuring outcomes.

• Techniques for prioritizing, making decisions, and managing risks.

• Approaches like Agile, Lean, and DevOps.

• 1.3 People

The most important element is leadership, which is about inspiring and guiding teams and building a positive work environment.

As a leader, you should understand how to:

• Build a culture based on trust and psychological safety.

• Get buy-in and resolve conflicts.

• Lead with context so that team members understand why the work is important and how it will create value for the customers and the business. Leading with context enables others to make better autonomous decisions.

• 1.4 Data Analytics

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Data analytics is the backbone of data-driven product management.

You should know:

• Frameworks like the North Star Framework and One Metric That Matters so that you can focus on just a few key metrics.

• Other techniques like customer segmentation, funnel analysis, heatmaps, and session recordings to get additional insights into user behavior.

• How to read the data and extract the important insights.

Data analytics is a concept broader than product analytics and includes analyzing data from other sources (e.g., CRM, transactional data).




• 1.5 Product Discovery

Product Discovery is the most critical area for a Product Manager.

You should know how to:

• Explore the Problem Space to understand and define opportunities (problems, needs, desires),

• Explore the Solution Space to brainstorm possible solutions, formulate testable assumptions, and plan experiments to prove or disprove those assumptions.

• Identify high-risk assumptions about value, usability, feasibility, viability, and ethics to tackle them before implementation.

• Work with both new and existing products.

• 1.6 Experimentation

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Experimentation is crucial for validating assumptions.

You should know:

• Different kinds of MVP Prototypes (or “Pretotypes”) help you validate product ideas at an early stage, in particular, market engagement hypotheses.

• User prototypes and how to use them in experiments like first-click testing, card sorting, 5-second tests, and more to assess the value and usability of specific features.

• Other methods like A/B testing and multivariate resting to get statistical data on how changes affect your metrics.

• 1.7 Product Marketing


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The role of a Product Marketer (or Product Marketing Manager, PMM for short) varies across companies. However, the best product companies:

“While the product manager focuses on the product side of the equation, the product marketer focuses o the market side, including the go-to-market strategy” - Martina Lauchengco, Loved

You should understand:

• How to communicate your product's value.

• How to prepare and execute a go-to-market.

• How to enable sales and partners to spread the word.

• 1.8 Product Growth



Product Growth focuses on scaling the product and gaining wider adoption.

You should know:

• How product-led growth combines sales, marketing, onboarding, and support, all led by the product.

• Terms like Time to Value (TTV) and the "Aha moment."

• How to enhance onboarding using the Bowling Alley Framework.

• Different pricing models, their differences, advantages, and disadvantages.

2. Competencies by Product Role

My assessment of the required competencies comes from interviewing over 200 product professionals via video calls in the past year, plus my 9+ years of experience in product.

Keep in mind that results can vary a lot depending on the organization.

3. Product Management Skills Assessment

Below, you'll find a link to a graded skills assessment with 32 questions from each of those product management areas:

1. Strategy and Business (4 points)

2. Execution (4 points)

3. People (4 points)

4. Data Analytics (4 points)

5. Product Discovery (4 points)

6. Experimentation (4 points)

7. Product Marketing (4 points)

8. Product Growth (4 points)

Take the test, check your knowledge, get feedback, and keep on learning: https://forms.gle/NimGpmWRWEDKbaHi8

[Edit 9/18/2023] A score distribution after getting 327 responses:

4. Competence Map to Download

Below, you can download the full competence map in PDF format.

Please note that this is a living document. I'll be adding more information, resources, and clickable links soon.

An interactive, online document: https://xmind.works/share/PnDamsJH

By Paweł Huryn

https://www.productcompass.pm/p/your-pm-competence-map-skills-assessment?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2