PM competency rubrics must be heavily customized, not copied
Petra Wille · How to be the best coach to product people | Petra Wille (Strong Product People) · Nov 27, 2022 · at 22:19
Petra Wille, author of Strong Product People, discusses how managers should evaluate product managers when their company lacks an internal competency matrix.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 21.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Don't use it just by copy paste because sometimes you have just rather technical VMs in your organization, and then all these assessment points about user interviews and discovery are maybe not that applicable in your situation, right? So use one template that is close to what you want to achieve. Heavy customize it”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Petra Wille
T-shaped skill profiles are insufficient for product managers
“People tend to talk about T-shaped employee profiles. But T-shaped is so not enough for a product person, right? We want them to understand underlying problems of the business and the users, finding solution for those, getting things out of the door with the t…”
Personal development should not be an employee's top priority
“Personal development will never be the number one priority. And it shouldn't.”
Many product leaders lack PM backgrounds and empathy for PMs
“At least with a lot of clients that I'm working with, they are not trained product people. So they often come from a marketing background or a business background or from the data background, so to say, or the engineering background, but they often never have …”
Non-PM managers force PMs to reinvent solved solutions
“As the line manager has no clue about the product community out there and the craft of product management, they often struggle to point them in the right direction to say like, Hey, I think that's a problem somebody else already had. So maybe you could watch a…”
Product leaders should create local team competency frameworks
“Grade your compass and encourage your peers to grade their compass and a bit down the line. It might make sense to harmonize some of that, but it's better to start helping your product folks and giving them some orientation than being totally paralyzed by the …”