PB 21/6: Are you any good as a PM?

Here's four different frameworks to help you find out.

We’re at that half-way point in the year, and there’s a good chance that you’re getting or giving some kind of mid-year feedback.

Or perhaps you’re thinking about your next job - either internally or externally, and you’re taking a look in the mirror and asking yourself where your strengths are, and where there are things you really need to focus on.

Or perhaps you’re thinking about how either all or some of your team need to step up in the second half of this year.

In all of these cases, you really need to lean on some sort of product capability model. Not the most exciting terminology I know, but it’s something I’ve found essential as both a manager and a coach.

Now - if you’ve never seen a model like this, or you’ve seen a few and not known how it might be relevant to you. Fear not! All is about to be explained.

What is this capability model of which you speak?

All PMs love a a nice pretty diagram. Most are either a dressed up list, or description of a process. And this is no different, it’s just a list of the stuff that you need to be good at in order to be good at being a good PM. Hell, let’s make that a ‘great PM’.

I’m going to give four examples below. Three from great product thinkers, and one of my own.

They all do the same thing in slightly different ways, namely they break thee PM role into a set of clear chunks/ clusters/ areas they enable four different things.

1. As an individual: It helps you define and name your talent and the areas where you need to improve

2. In a manager/ team member relationship: it enables structured feedback and development discussions, removing emotion and ambiguity.

3. As a team leader: It can give you a consistent overall map of team strengths and gaps.

I’ve found point 2 to be particularly useful. Without something like this it’s remarkable how unstructured and unhelpful feedback and development guidance can be. There’s the persistently useless ‘be more strategic’, but more than that without a framework to work from it can often feel very scatter gun and very ambiguous.

And so onto our four models..

Shreyas’s 3 Essential Senses

OK, I’ll admit it was listening to Shreyas talk earlier this week that I went back to this whole issue of these frameworks. And he’s also very big on ‘find the one that works for you’ ..so I’ll start with him.

Shreyas’s 3 Essential Senses of a PM is a simple route into the key aspects of product management, with a lot to unpack within each of the ‘senses’.

If you follow the link above, and in fact generally follow Shreyas on YouTube or Twitter - you will hear him unpack this. '

Ravi Mehta’s Product Competencies

Next Ravi Mehta’s Product Competencies

It looks like there’s a lot here - and that’s because it’s deliberately exhaustive. It’s simply not credible for you or any PM to be getting an A* in each of the 12 boxes. As Ravi says.

Most PMs, even peak PMs, excel at only a handful of these competencies. The difference between the average PM and the peak PM is an understanding of gaps and the ability to unite a team that fills those gaps.

Which is really the key to all these frameworks. No one is awesome at everything. If you’re lucky you will have one or two things that you are truly great at. The skill is in making sure that in all the other areas that matter in your role, you’re strong enough to

Petra’s Product Wheel

Then there’s Petra Wille’s Product Wheel..and I really think you should read her full description of it to do it justice. She provides a full pdf with all the detail in.

My own contribution to the genre

And finally, my own humble contribution to the genre…which I will call Simon’s awesome PM stack (for clarity: that’s a stack for creating awesome PMs….not saying that my stack is awesome).

I can (and maybe will in a future week) go into this in much more detail, but I’ve found this useful for working with my team and people I’m coaching, primarily because it reflects the way I see Product Management work clustered up.

Along the top it’s all around the three specific functions of a PM..

Discovery: Understanding your customers, their problems, and how you need to solve them

Setting Direction: From setting a vision to working out what you’re going to focus on and presenting this as a clear plan

Delivery: Which is where - if done well - the magic happens, and you make the kind of fine grain decisions (normally about prioritisation and exact scope) that make the difference something that ticks the boxes of your plan, or something that really delivers results.

This then gets underpinned by what I think of as three ‘muscle groups’ which are sets of adjacent skills that you need to be able to flex accordingly.

Analysis and Decision Making: Because whatever we do as product managers we need to constantly be weighing up evidence and either making decisions based on the back of it..or helping others make those decisions.

Communication, Collaboration and Influence: Which I group together because this is your toolkit for working effectively within any organisation.

Product Sense and Expertise: Which combines both your general product capability and intuition along with your specific expertise of either a given domain or your specific product.

Which is right for you?

The simple answer to that is - whichever instantly resonates with you, ie: whichever one you look at and can start to map yourself against.

I like (ie: I’m jealous of) the simplicity of Shreyas’; but also like mine because it leans in on two things I’m passionate about: Discovery and Decision making. I think Ravi’s is the most comprehensive, but perhaps a bit overwhelmingly so; and Petra’s tbh isn’t quite to my taste..but that’s just me, it might be just the thing for you.

The differences between them though are really the differences in the different ways of thinking of the creators. The underlying assessment is pretty much the same.

Rather like exercising, saving for a pension, the difference between each of the options is marginal; but the difference between doing something and doing nothing is immense.

Where to start…

The absolute simplest way to do this is to just pick which model works for you, and then mark yourself out of 5 for each item.

Be prepared to bump yourself up to 6 if you think you’re utterly awesome, and go to -1 if you really need to transform yourself.

The next thing to do is to ask your manager to do the same for you - see where you agree, and disagree.

If you are a manager - do this with everyone in your team.

Did I mention I’m a coach?

Perhaps, by some miracle, that passed you by ;-) If you’re a leader who wants to roll out a capability model like this, or if you’re an individual who wants someone to partner with as you look to develop - just reply to this newsletter , head to https://simonwaldman.uk, or find me on Linked in, and let’s see if I can help.