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How Do Your Product Management Skills Measure Up?

Blog Author: Kenny Kranseler

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A Product Manager’s experience, along with education, can indicate what they know and what they have done. However, the best way to understand a Product Manager’s abilities and level of proficiency is through a skills assessment.

What Is a Skills Assessment?

A skills assessment is an evaluation of an individual’s ability to perform a specific skill or set of skills, as they pertain to a job or role. Ideally, the assessment captures the level of proficiency for each skill, to indicate which participants are new to a skill and which ones have mastered it. Some Product Managers are strong on education – albeit usually not specific to Product Management and most likely pertaining to other roles such as engineering, marketing, IT, or customer success. Others are rich in experience. Skills assessments give no weight to how Product Managers learned what they know; they measure what they can do.

Benefits of Completing a Skills Assessment

Completing a skills assessment can be an astute first step to understanding what kind of training, learning, or development initiatives are required based on:

  • Your current organization’s initiatives, such as of business transformation, digital transformation, a restructuring, or a merger or acquisition.
  • A desire to advance in your Product Management career.
  • Preparing for a Product Management interview, so you can focus on your highly rated skills.
  • A need to up-level you overall skill rating with formal Product Management training.

Individual Skills Assessment (ISA)

In mid-2018, Productside launched the Individual Skills Assessment (ISA), which has been completed by more than 4,000 individual Product Professionals to date. The results of these responses were analyzed and compiled into the second edition of our Product Management Benchmark Skills Report. This report brings the Individual Skills Assessment one step further by enabling Product Professionals to assess their skills and compare them against our global benchmark, a global survey that examines the skill levels of Product Managers across 15 dimensions, called skill sets.

Product Managers can compare their skills against the benchmark according to experience, job title, training, product process, industry, region, and other factors.

About The Author

Kenny Kranseler

Principal Consultant and Trainer at Productside. With 25+ years at Amazon, Microsoft, and startups, Kenny inspires teams with sharp insights and great stories.
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Frequently Asked Questions

A skills assessment provides a clearer picture of a Product Manager’s capabilities than experience alone because it measures what someone can actually do, not just where they have worked. Titles and tenure vary widely across organizations, while a structured assessment evaluates real proficiency across critical product management skill areas.
A product management skills assessment evaluates proficiency across a defined set of core competencies required for success in the role. Rather than focusing on education or years of experience, it measures how effectively a Product Manager can perform key activities such as strategy, research, planning, execution, and decision-making within real-world product environments.
A skills assessment helps Product Managers identify strengths to highlight and gaps to address as they plan their career growth. By understanding where their skills rank against a broader benchmark, Product Managers can focus development efforts, prepare more effectively for interviews, and make informed decisions about training and professional advancement.
Benchmarking product management skills allows individuals and organizations to compare proficiency levels against industry peers rather than relying on subjective judgment. This context helps Product Managers understand how competitive their skills are in the market and enables leaders to make data-driven decisions about hiring, training, and team development priorities.
Organizations should use product management skills assessments as a foundation for targeted development and transformation initiatives. Assessment results highlight systemic strengths and gaps, enabling leaders to align training investments with business goals, support digital or organizational change, and build stronger, more consistent product management practices across teams.

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