Skills Assessment

Personalized assessments of each Product Managers skills to help make your team stronger.

The product manager role is defined so broadly that its difficult to excel at all aspects. Using the PPM Skills Baseline Tool, you can identify priority skills in your organization, and assess individual team members on those skills. Then, establish a personalized baseline for skill development and measuring skills improvement.

The Pivotal Product Management Skills Assessment program is a comprehensive, qualitative measurement of an individual's current skills and behaviors across 13 performance categories. These encompass key product management and product marketing responsibilities, as well as the most critical & soft skills that cross-functional leaders need:

Business focus
Customer focus
Product management process
Product champion
Product management tasks and skills
Product marketing tasks and skills
Decision making
Communication
Presentation
Time management
Leadership
Matrix management
Team management

How It Works

The PPM Skills Assessment asks 81 questions about behaviors that are key indicators of a product manager's success. Participants indicate how frequently they see an individual demonstrating specific behaviors. Executives identify the importance of those same behaviors to indicate where they expect the product management team to focus its resources.

The results show comparative scores so that the individual can see how he/she is perceived by management and by peers. In addition, the results can include the expectations expressed by the executive team.

Pivotal Product Management discusses the scores with each individual and his/her manager to gain a better understanding of the perceived gaps from both points of view. We then recommend training and coaching programs.

After training and coaching, the assessment can be taken again to measure the level of performance improvement.

How It's Used

Pivotal Product Management clients use the PPM Skills Assessment program in three ways:

To develop a 360-degree assessment of an individual's performance from the individual's cross-functional peer group, as well as the manager's point of view.
To measure the executive team's expectations and needs for product management and product marketing.
To build consensus within the executive and mid-management levels regarding the focus of the product management and product marketing functions.

The PPM Skills Assessment is most meaningful when it reflects input from the individual, his/her manager, and at least three peers from other functions outside product management.

In addition, adding executive-level expectations regarding the product management role helps Management understand where both individual and team performance needs to improve.

View a sample PPM Assessment (link to pdf)