How to Evaluate the Skills of Your Product Management Team

When you’re new to leading product managers, how do you evaluate the skills of your product management team?

Product managers need to be highly competent in many different areas. As a product leader, it’s your job to coach them until they’re competent.

Here are some questions I’ve found helpful when evaluating the product managers that I’ve led.

Understanding Customer Problems

• Can they identify a clear customer problem to solve?
• Can they back it up with evidence?
• Do they understand our customers at a deep level? Motives, behaviors, beliefs?

Discovery

• Can they lead the discovery process? Do they know how to use a wide variety of discovery methods to get to the best solution possible?
• Do they understand and mitigate all areas of risk doing discovery (viability, value, usability, feasibility)?
• Do they get the team involved in bringing solutions to the table?

Planning and Strategy

• Can they put a plan together for both the short-term and mid-term? If more senior, longer-term?
• Can they take input from the team on what needs to be solved at a technical level and incorporate that into the plan?
• Are they able to communicate that plan clearly to stakeholders to get alignment?

Team

• Are they a good team player (hungry, humble, smart)?
• Are they able to lead with influence?
• Are they good at creating a safe environment for their team to discuss problems and solutions?
• Do they ensure they have the skillsets they need on their team, and if not, elevate those concerns to stakeholders?
• Do they have a good relationship with their tech lead and their delivery manager?

Measuring and Improving

• Does the product manager know how to take an iterative approach to what they build to gradually improve it over time?
• Do they understand their product metrics and regularly spend time learning about them?
• Do they follow-up with customers after something has launched to see if it truly meets their needs?

Growth and Learning

• Do they routinely find new ways of doing something and incorporate it into their day-to-day?
• Do they learn for learning’s sake?
• Are they investing in their personal growth?
• Do they take ownership for their work, their team, and their circumstances?

Getting Stuff Done

• Can they work with a team to get clear on what needs to be done?
• Do they know how to facilitate team meetings well?

Credit to Petra Wille and Hope Gurion for helping me develop this list over the years!