State of PM Maturity

About Productside and How to Participate

Kenny Kranseler | 00:01:20–00:04:00
All right, welcome everybody. So you are dialing into the Productside webinar on the state of PM maturity. We have Rina, our CEO, leading the discussion and I am supporting her. Right.

Usually our roles are switched. So today I will be supporting Rina. I’ll be the one chiming in and interrupting poor Rina with questions and comments and concerns and things that I pick up along the way.

Before we dive into our core topic for today around PM maturity, I want to give a little bit of context. Let me start by welcoming you and introducing a little bit about Productside.

At Productside, we really know how difficult the job that product managers have is — to deliver products that people not only use but actually love. Whether it’s doing things like aligning stakeholders, predicting customer needs, managing those endless backlogs, we’ve seen it all.

We’re really here for organizations or individual product managers to be your outcome-driven product partner. As part of our work, we don’t just provide solutions, we tailor them to individual needs and company needs, making sure that the transformation you have is truly successful. Anywhere from strategy to execution, we’re with you every step of the way. And as noted, we tailor it. We get an understanding of the challenges you face, be that again an individual or an organization, and we build our solutions around that.

We have lots of invested experts, people who have spent a long time in product management and are really obsessed with your success. So we’re really happy to have you all here today and want to make this as valuable for you as possible.

We want to make it interactive. The first question I always get is, can I watch this recording later? And the answer is absolutely yes. We’ll send everybody that attends the webinar a link to the recording after the webinar concludes.

During the session, we really want to hear from you. Please use the Q&A feature that’s in Zoom to ask questions. I’ll be monitoring it throughout, and as I said, I might interrupt Rina along the way. Don’t feel you have to wait until the end to ask questions. Ask them as they come in context. We love engaging with folks in real time.

We also have a chat feature. Please use the chat feature to connect with your fellow product managers that are on this Zoom meeting. You can ask your colleagues questions, share your own experiences, or just cheer each other on. Chat’s a great place for you to learn from each other as much as you do from us.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:04:00–00:05:30
One other thing before I turn it over: please connect with us on LinkedIn. We have lots of content that we post on LinkedIn, usually on a daily basis. We put things like best practices around product leadership, key conversations that’ll help you in your role, how to make it more impactful, and just really an opportunity for you to network with other professionals who share some of the same challenges in product management and goals that you might have.

All you have to do is use the QR code on the slide to your right and you will connect automatically with the Productside LinkedIn page.

So now, without further ado, let me let Rina take it over and share with you our Product Management Maturity Report.

What Is the Product Management Maturity Report?

Rina Alexin | 00:05:30–00:08:30
All right, thank you, Kenny. And it looks like we have some more international people on. So welcome everyone. I’m really excited about today because we’ve been working on this maturity report for a while.

The goal today is really to share the top findings and to talk a little bit about some of the key insights. I’m only going to be diving into insights from the study by job title and industry. If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about the insights around company size and region, you’re going to have to download the full report. But we’re going to share some of the interesting things that came out of this report.

So what is the Product Management Maturity Report? It’s a report that leverages findings from our Productside Team Assessment. The Team Assessment is a survey tool that we’ve developed that asks about 30 questions. It’s geared towards product leaders and it tries to assess product management capability across different capability areas.

Rather than tell you, in true Productside spirit, I’d rather show you. So with that, we’re actually going to launch our first poll.

This is: “Our organization has a clear and consistent product process that is documented, understood, and used across the organization.”

Please answer this as best as you can. Either that you just don’t do this at all, you do it rarely with poor quality, sometimes with moderate quality, often with good quality, or always do it with outstanding quality.

A point here is when writing these survey questions, we really had a tough balancing act to try to figure out how do we capture so much about what product management is — which is extremely hard and complex — and still make it a good question.

So in this case, for example, if you’re in a situation where your product process is documented but not used across the organization, I’d probably write something like “do rarely.” You kind of have to tick all of those three boxes in order to truly do it outstanding in outstanding quality.

Rina Alexin | 00:08:30–00:10:30
All right, so I think we’ve got enough folks. We’ve got most of the folks here. Let’s share the results out.

It looks like “do rarely and with poor quality” is sort of the nexus of people’s response. That’s kind of what I wanted to see. It’s pretty consistent with our findings.

Before I get to the findings — and I’m going to try to do this super fast — I need to just orient everybody on the call with what the report is and what the numbers all mean.

First, as I mentioned, it’s a survey with 30 questions. It uses a zero-to-four scale. In the poll it was like a one-to-five, but essentially the zero-to-four correlates to where the maturity levels are for each of those areas.

Most companies are sitting somewhere between low and fair maturity. Very few are in the high, “do things great or well with enough frequency” space to really merit a high maturity score. I’m kind of glad we did this poll, Kenny, because I think the team on the webinar would have scored about a 1.4 on this one, somewhere around there, probably.

The Productside Blueprint and Capability Areas

Rina Alexin | 00:10:30–00:13:30
But what do these scores mean and what are the capability areas?

For those of you who hopefully know us at Productside, we like to essentially build on the Productside Blueprint. The Blueprint here is a way to view product management, and it’s essentially our framework.

The framework has five different areas, but we split one of them into two. That’s because we felt, given that this survey is geared towards team leaders, that by also splitting “Context” into “Context” and “Team Leadership,” we were able to give a little bit more information to team leaders on how their leading and coaching might impact maturity on their team.

Context is — and I think this is something that really sets us apart, Kenny — we talk about context a lot because of how important it is and how it essentially changes how product management is done at various companies. Context covers not just your internal strategy; it’s your market, it’s your users, and it’s why a lot of companies do product so differently. So that’s one of the capability areas.

The rest should feel familiar. It’s the canvas with which we paint our product management practice. There should be a discover/investigate phase where you’re discovering problems; one where you’re defining the solutions — those are still hypotheses of solutions.

“Create” is more than just building the solution. It’s also planning ahead, roadmapping, defining those KPIs, defining the launch plan. And “Deliver” also goes beyond launch. That’s an important point here. I want everybody to understand that Deliver is more than just delivering the thing out to the market. It’s that it is successful. So it covers measuring how that product is doing post-launch, iteration, and even making end-of-life decisions.

Who Responded and Overall Maturity Levels

Rina Alexin | 00:13:30–00:15:00
On demographics — and this one’s going to go super quick — I just want everybody here to know there are over 200 responses. There were more than this, but we cut many of them. These are the ones that we focused on.

For the insights, we cut data for any segment that had at least 10 responses, but for the deeper insights we focused on the larger areas. So for example: US, Europe, Asia, not so much Oceania. And we focused on the industry sectors that had enough answers to have more robust insight.

Here’s the main Product Management Team Maturity Report outcome. All of the six capability areas are kind of clustered between 1.9 and 2.2. And if you remember, on that zero-to-four scale, we kind of want people to go towards the threes and fours, but not a single major segment really got there. There were some smaller segments that achieved closer to high maturity, but most of the segments were somewhere between low and fair.

If you were to take this assessment, this is a benchmark, but I wouldn’t recommend using it as “how do I compare to everybody else?” It’s not — I don’t think — the goal of a team assessment to help you understand where your team is against some other team out there in the ether. Instead, view it more like a fitness assessment where you’re trying to baseline your current health and fitness metrics and you’re trying to improve those over time.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:15:00–00:15:40
Yeah, our hope is to get everybody above a three on this at least. I don’t want people to just say, “Okay, fair. Everyone’s fair, so let’s just stay there.”

Strengths, Bright Spots, and Midsize Company Patterns

Rina Alexin | 00:15:40–00:18:40
Exactly. So what were some of the top findings?

In addition to the 30 survey questions that we ran, we also asked product leaders, “Of these capability areas, which do you find to be the most important?”

Thirty-seven percent answered Deliver. And this was by far the top choice in just about every single segment. The interesting part, though, Kenny, is that Deliver was also one of the lowest maturities that we saw. If it was Deliver and Context, I think those struggled the most.

In terms of strengths, there were a few questions that stood out as being somewhat higher quality. The one that I wanted to point out is articulating needs.

“My product management team clearly articulates customer needs and problems to cross-functional stakeholders.” I was happy to see that one be high because one of the challenges that we find with product management is the communication to stakeholders and the deep understanding of needs. You have to have both. Seeing this be one of the questions that got the highest rating — still a fair maturity — was promising. There’s room for growth there, but we’re doing pretty good on that one, I guess.

Honestly for me that was a surprise. I was expecting this to be low.

We also found that there were product managers who felt in control of their priorities. I thought that was also really good. I think this one — because we’re not sharing about regions here — was particularly in Europe. But that’s also a good sign, because a lot of times product managers feel stuck, that they can’t manage their priorities because they have to do what other people are requesting of them. So this one was also a positive sign to see a higher level of maturity.

Rina Alexin | 00:18:40–00:20:10
We also found that midsize companies — and actually everyone has a different definition of what is midsize — but essentially companies with employees of at least 50 to 500 showed comparatively stronger maturity compared to some of the other size bands.

I wanted to also bring that up since we’re not doing a full company-size deep dive here. We talked about this, Kenny. This probably is because at that level you have just enough process and resources without all of the major complexity of a larger organization. So that may be why we’re seeing that kind of trend in this company-size band.

We did see bright spots across every single segment. So no matter which company you are in, there are ways to increase maturity.

Poll: End-of-Life Decisions and the Importance of “Deliver”

Rina Alexin | 00:20:10–00:22:40
Let’s run another poll really quick, and then we’re going to go into some of the challenges.

“My product management team evaluates product performance to determine which products to end of life.”

I’m curious how this one’s going to end up. So again, it’s the same answer scale. I’m going to be wondering how many fives I get. End of life is always a tricky scenario for product managers — which products to kill. But if you don’t kill them, you wind up with something that’s way too full.

All right, we’re doing this. Okay, so we’ve got a pretty even split. They’re all at the low end, which is to be expected. We got one that has “do often with good quality,” but most people are doing this rarely or not at all.

We’re going to do a couple more of these polls in this session. Again, this is going to be a very interactive webinar. But they all kind of seem like a lot of people don’t do this one.

Before we go into why we did the end-of-life question, in addition to the 30 survey questions, we also asked product leaders: of these capability areas, which do you find to be the most important?

Thirty-seven percent answered Deliver, and this was by far the top choice in just about every single segment. The interesting part, though, is that Deliver was also, as I said, one of the lowest maturities that we saw.

Rina Alexin | 00:22:40–00:24:40
We also identified some of the lowest-scoring specific questions, and two of them really stood out.

The first was exactly this: “My product management team evaluates product performance to determine which products to end of life.”

We saw this consistently as a challenge for product management teams. We also find this in our Skills Benchmark reports. One of the weakest skills for product managers is end of life.

Part of this is simply lack of practice. Not all product managers get that many opportunities to retire products. I’ve been in rooms with product managers where they’re asking us for advice on how to have a conversation with their leadership because they want to retire a product, but leadership does not.

Sometimes this is a struggle for leadership to say no to revenue that maybe has downstream impacts across the board on the company. So it’s definitely a challenge, and one I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about in this webinar.

Market Research, PESTL, and Staying Ahead of Change

Rina Alexin | 00:24:40–00:27:10
The second lowest-scoring area was conducting regular market research to identify market changes that impact their product.

We did another poll around that: “My product management team conducts regular market research to identify market changes that impact their product.” And we saw that a lot of people felt they were doing this only sometimes, with moderate quality.

When we talk about this in the context of maturity, it’s not necessarily just about doing market research, but about being ahead of your market and really understanding the impact and the changes it can have on you.

So it’s more about staying ahead of the market as part of the Context of product management, rather than just knowing today’s needs. It’s about anticipating future needs. And we did see that, in general, product managers struggled with this.

For both of these — end-of-life decisions and market research — one of the things that you can do to strengthen them is to go to trusty old PESTL.

We teach this framework quite frequently because it’s not done often enough at most companies. It’s quite simple: just understand the external forces that impact your product. By thinking about those external forces, you can actually stay ahead of market changes.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:27:10–00:29:10
Yeah, keeping that monitor up is crucial. I was working with a company where we basically delivered traffic information to a lot of different other organizations.

Early on, our biggest market was portable navigation devices — think of companies like Garmin and TomTom and those kinds of things. Early on, they were our bread and butter. They were where we put a lot of our information and made a lot of money from those folks.

Then the iPhone came out. And the one thing that completely crippled that market was when Google Maps put turn-by-turn directions in their Google Maps app on iPhone.

If we hadn’t been ahead of that, we wouldn’t have known that suddenly we needed to stop investing in that opportunity and focus on some of the other opportunities that we had out there, because that market just crumbled within the course of two or three months.

So you have to stay on top of these external changes. In that case, it was a technological change that completely overturned the market. If we hadn’t stayed on top of it, we would have lost it and kept investing in a market that wasn’t there anymore.

Rina Alexin | 00:29:10–00:30:40
That’s a really good example of both end of life as well as staying ahead.

It’s super important to be able to communicate the “why” behind an end-of-life decision. I think that’s why a lot of product managers struggle. It’s not about leaders just hearing, “We’re going to lose a lot of revenue.” What leadership often hears is, “This is going to be a mistake and my head is going to be on the line.”

So you have to bring the “why” of what you are investing in this product that is not serving the business anymore, because there are limited resources. Everybody knows this; it’s also one of the top challenges.

Companies often don’t realize how much products cost them — the maintenance, the support, the operational complexity, just putting it on a price sheet in some instances to deflect folks’ attention is a big cost. End of life helps with that.

I’m hopeful to see more and more maturity on end-of-life decisions over time.

Audience Question: Ownership Type and Maturity

Kenny Kranseler | 00:30:40–00:31:10
There was a question that came in that people wanted to know: was there a correlation of perception of maturity with company ownership type — public, private, private-equity funded, startups, those kinds of things?

Rina Alexin | 00:31:10–00:33:10
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I don’t think we asked the private-versus-public demographic question this time, but now I think I’m going to add it into our next version because that’s a really good cut.

I will say the larger firms that answered most likely are public. So I can’t speak to it from this data. I don’t have the data to speak to this; I can only speak qualitatively from working with different types of firms.

With PE-backed companies, they tend to have maturity challenges that stem from bolt-on acquisitions and add-ons, with a misalignment on the product process. With public companies, they tend to be very large organizations with a lot of interdependencies, so those are the roadblocks that I hear a lot with those kinds of companies.

But this is a good question to add to our demographic data next time.

Findings by Title: The VP vs. IC Perception Gap

Rina Alexin | 00:33:10–00:37:10
Next I’m going to go into findings by title. Again, I’m not going to go into company size or region here, but the report certainly has a few more insights there.

The first one that I wanted to talk about was the VP and IC perception gap. This is something that we found.

If you look at the periwinkle line on the chart, it’s almost always higher than the others. Even though I mentioned at the start that this survey is geared towards product leaders, it’s open to anybody to take. So we also had product managers, ICs, take it.

When looking at this data, it’s pretty fascinating. The blue line represents VPs and CPOs; the gap between that and the PM line is really big. And there were enough leaders to do this comparison.

Directors, interestingly enough, are kind of in the middle of the road. It’s almost like the more experienced you get, the less mature you deem your organization. This is company-size and industry-agnostic; this is just leadership level.

We were thinking, why is this happening? It could be a couple of reasons. We’re guessing here — we’re in the land of guesswork — but one idea is that there’s just no alignment on what “great” looks like to begin with.

It could be leaders are not communicating expectations. It could also be just a complete lack of experience on the PM side, where they think whatever they’re doing is the right way to do it and they haven’t seen enough other ways to do something. So they might feel the status quo is good enough.

Overall this perception gap, if I’m in my shoes as a leader, could be very frustrating. If I see a problem with my maturity but the people reporting to me do not, then it’s going to be harder for me to motivate change, because they don’t see the same thing that I see.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:37:10–00:38:40
Yeah, I do see this. A lot of product managers think, “Hey, I’m delivering a whole bunch of results and I’m getting it out there and we’re turning the crank every three to six weeks, however long our sprint is.”

They don’t really recognize that they may not be delivering the outcomes that the company wants. Sometimes the leader sees that, whereas the individual PM does not. So they think everything’s going well because they’re delivering lots of output, but they aren’t necessarily delivering the results that are driven by that output.

Closing the Gap: Outcome-Guided Strategy Template

Rina Alexin | 00:38:40–00:41:40
It could also be a perception gap when answering the survey. Leaders might be thinking, “I do this, but maybe my team doesn’t.” That could also be something that’s contributing.

It’s interesting to see that the higher up people go, the more dramatic the difference is. Still, overall we’re on the lower end of fair maturity.

When we talk to our clients, sometimes they’re just not having certain very valuable conversations. The best way to close this kind of perception gap is actually to talk about it.

That’s why I love this template from the Productside Playbook. It’s one of my favorites, and it’s the very first template — and it’s that way for a reason. Until you get aligned on what outcomes are and what you’re doing to achieve them, it’s really hard to have a real conversation about why you’re not succeeding.

I want everybody on this call — this is going to be available for download for everybody who registered — to take this template into your next one-on-one. Whether you’re a product leader or a product manager, bring this template.

If you’re not clear on outcomes, and even if you are, it’s just a really good time of year to reset. Have an open discussion: what business outcomes are you collectively aiming for? What are you trying to achieve as a team, and what’s getting in the way of that?

Once you align on business outcomes and also the product outcomes — meaning, what are your customers going to see differently as a result of you working on your product that’s going to support you obtaining those business outcomes — then you can do the confidence check-in.

After you have that discussion, actually grade yourselves on how confident you are that you’re aligned. If it’s on the low end, have the conversation again. It’s a great way to constantly have this conversation together to increase alignment, and I think that’s going to help solve that perception gap.

As I mentioned, the template is available to everybody. We’re going to send it in the follow-up email.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:41:40–00:42:40
As you mentioned, this should be a two-way conversation. If you’re a product manager on the call working with leaders, bring this in and say, “Please help me answer these questions.”

And if you’re a leader who has a bunch of product managers working for you, again, bring this in and make sure that your product managers understand it and that you’ve filled it out in a way that allows them to understand it. Hopefully you get to that little green dot on the confidence check-in. That is the goal.

Industry Insights: Healthcare vs. Financial Services

Rina Alexin | 00:42:40–00:45:10
Next I’m going to go into findings by industry, and we’re going to launch our last poll.

“My product management team is well disciplined at monitoring product adoption metrics and adjusting strategies accordingly.” I’m curious how people will end up answering this. This gets at the heart of Deliver.

We saw in the data that Deliver did not do so well, and a big part of maturity in Deliver is monitoring product adoption metrics — measuring the success of a product. To do that, you need to know whether or not it’s getting adopted and what’s happening to it.

Looking at the poll results, it looks like most people do this rarely. They try, but they do it rarely or with poor quality. I’m not surprised, again, given what I know about the report. If you’ve posted that you don’t do this, you are not alone.

Here’s the insights by industry. I’m going to cover a couple of these.

We did include Energy on the chart, but I’m not going to talk about Energy except to say that it did have more than 10 respondents, but it wasn’t as robust as some of the other industries. Instead, I want to talk about Healthcare and Life Sciences, and Financial Services.

Healthcare and Life Sciences, compared to the others based on the respondents that we had, has some of the higher reported maturities. The ones that are particularly high are in Discover: investigate and define, both above the overall average.

Financial Services — and again, if anyone’s calling from a bank or insurance company and you’re feeling, “Hey, my team is not there,” many of your peers felt the same. Financial Services has some of the lowest maturity scores that we saw.

The Context bar — really understanding the internal organization, the market, and the users — was particularly low. Both industries struggled in Deliver relatively speaking, but Financial Services was notably low there as well. Transportation and logistics, ironically, also struggled in Deliver.

It’s a theme in this report: Deliver is just not doing so well across many industries.

Measuring Outcomes and Product Health

Rina Alexin | 00:45:10–00:47:40
So what do you do? I just shared a template on having an outcome-guided strategy discussion. That’s great for setting the outcomes, but you then actually have to measure them.

This “Measuring Outcomes” template is a simple but really powerful tool that helps product teams measure their outcomes. It’s meant to be a living document, not a one-and-done exercise — actually, most of our Playbook templates are not one-and-done.

This template helps your team track your business outcomes, product outcomes, success metrics — those are the indicators of whether or not you’re actually meeting those business goals — and the product health metrics.

Product health metrics are essentially “is your product not getting in the way?” It’s alive, it’s doing well, it’s not standing in the way in terms of reliability. It’s not standing in the way of adoption.

In terms of adoption metrics, you would put them in the product success metrics section and you would see how people are using the product and how they are engaging with it. Using this kind of template will help you measure that.

I do know — and Kenny, you can correct me if I’m wrong — sometimes people score low on the product adoption piece because they’re not even measuring things or they find it hard to measure.

I feel like in the world of SaaS that should not be the case at all. Everyone should know how to measure. But in hardware products, even though there are sensors, there are companies who struggle with this.

The famous line is: you don’t manage what you don’t measure. You have to figure out a way to do it. There are many examples of teams in various industries who do figure out how to measure outcomes. Just saying, “I can’t get access to the data,” is not going to fly.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:47:40–00:49:10
The other thing I tend to see is that people wait until they’re actually in the Deliver phase — their product’s been launched — before they define some of these metrics.

That’s where you run into that problem, Rina, where, “Hey, we would have loved to have measured this, but we can’t because we didn’t build it into the product.”

You need to start thinking of what success looks like earlier in the process, upstream from when you actually produce the product, so you can actually measure some of these things.

Final Thoughts: Deliver as an Outcome of Everything Else

Rina Alexin | 00:49:10–00:52:10
I think that is a really good segue to our final thoughts.

Deliver showed up everywhere in the report. It was the most important capability according to leaders, and one of the weakest according to the data.

How do you get better at Deliver? Do you just magically fix it by focusing on metrics? No. It’s too late to start thinking about it only in Deliver.

Deliver is almost like the outcome of all of the other inputs in the Productside Blueprint. It means that you have to do just about everything else well in order to fix Deliver.

So I don’t disagree with the leaders and product managers who said Deliver is the most important capability — we have to have success out in the market, of course — but that’s the result of really strong work across the board.

It’s not enough to just focus on Deliver. If you start there, you’re way too late. You need to have strong work across all the other capability areas. That also includes your organization.

Context is so important to great outcomes for product management. I want to share this with the product managers listening: it’s also not just you. It’s the culture around your company. Context has to be there to support good product decisions.

You have to have solid discovery. You have to start with problems. Someone earlier asked about private equity — another problem for PE-backed companies is that because they’re often buying solutions, they’re trying to find new markets or new problems to then go and take those solutions to. That mentality is backwards.

It’s not going to be very useful and it could waste a lot of time and resources if you do it that way.

I also want to come back to the regulated-industry point. We chose to compare Healthcare and Life Sciences and Financial Services not just because one is slightly higher and one is really low, but because both of these industries are some of the most highly regulated industries.

I often hear from product managers that there’s a kind of hierarchy of “where is product management the hardest to do?” Those tend to be B2B regulated industries, maybe platform products, with a lot of users and different segments and personas you have to think through.

Here are two really regulated industries with very different results. We see this internally at Productside as well. We work with regulated industries all the time, and we know that maturity can still increase even with the constraints around context and regulation. It is challenging, but it doesn’t make product management maturity impossible.

There are teams doing well. So I want to end that part on a positive note: it is possible to do well. Don’t use regulation as a crutch.

Case Study and the Six Most Common Gaps

Rina Alexin | 00:52:10–00:55:40
We work with a lot of companies in regulated industries. What we do with our clients is use the Team Assessment like a fitness assessment. It allows us to baseline where you are today and then define where you want to go.

That’s what we like to do when we start our engagements: get the baselines not just of skills but also practices, and then rerun assessments and see, after we work with the team, how much better they are doing.

That’s what we did with a company called IATA. They are an association that — if you’ve booked an airplane ticket — you probably have seen their name, even if you haven’t noticed them. They work with airlines and they’re a global association.

We established a baseline benchmark. We did both skills assessments and maturity assessments. After completing the Optimal Product Management training and focusing on specific gaps, I believe they achieved about a 25% improvement in just three months. So three months after our check-in, there was a clear increase.

There’s even a case study now, and I read it. A lot of the issues were exactly what we’ve been talking about: teams were not talking to each other. Marketing was not involved early on in the planning process. Things were kind of thrown over the wall.

Strengthening strategy, discovery, go-to-market alignment — all of those practices helped them, and all of those were built on the Productside Blueprint. It’s just one example of how a good product management process can really accelerate maturity, even in a complex and regulated global organization.

On this slide there’s a little sign saying “Mind the Gap,” and these six icons represent the six lowest-scoring questions. We covered a few of them in this webinar: end-of-life decision-making, proactive market research, product adoption and monitoring. There’s also the product process itself.

The other ones that were low were around data, metrics and KPIs, and experimentation and validation. If you take all of these six — except maybe end of life, which isn’t as frequent — don’t they just look like core product management blocking-and-tackling? They’re the things you need to be successful as a product manager.

So none of these should be surprising. They’re core product management fundamentals. Our Maturity Assessment is supposed to measure exactly that. These are the most common gaps.

If you are struggling with any of these, again, you’re not alone. And the data from how we work with our clients shows that meaningful improvement is possible. It takes time, it takes hard work, and it takes a really strong leader — I’ll say that — as well as strong product managers who want to learn and want to do things differently. But it is possible to change.

What to Do Next: Assessment, Focus, and a Plan

Rina Alexin | 00:55:40–00:59:10
So what should you do next? If you’re on this webinar, hopefully you’re wondering, “Okay, this is what these teams are doing. What should I do?”

First is to actually do that fitness assessment. Take the Team Assessment. It’s completely free. You’ve actually answered a few of those questions already in our polls, so it shouldn’t be surprising or hard.

I recommend taking it honestly — brutally honestly — so that you get a true fitness assessment. It’s not going to work if you’re going to say, “I’m super healthy,” when you’re not. This is a true assessment of your strengths and weaknesses across these capability areas.

Second, focus on the product management fundamentals that I brought up on the previous page. Those are likely going to be similar across the board — the areas where you might need to focus. But use your own Team Assessment to truly understand, “Okay, maybe I don’t need to focus on Context because I have very limited control in this area right now. Instead I’m going to focus on KPIs and data this quarter.”

You don’t want to get overwhelmed and do it all poorly. You want to really focus on one area at a time. When we work with our clients, that’s what we do as well: we prioritize and focus.

Next is closing that perception gap. I’m assuming it exists because it just does so often. Take that outcome-guided discussion template and use it at your next one-on-one. Build that shared understanding between yourself and your leader, or if you’re the leader, between you and your product managers.

And then last: actually have a plan. Invest in boosting your maturity. By just taking the first three steps you’re already doing that, but also find an area where you can get meaningful progress.

Of course, we know how to do this; we help companies do it. But we also know that great product leaders and great product managers know how to build strong product capability. Sometimes it’s just having that assessment and having a plan.

The Team Assessment has tailored recommendations — recommendations and resources — so grab them. We have tons of free resources; take advantage of them. In fact, we have our full Playbook and the ebook that’s co-authored by Kenny.

Kenny Kranseler | 00:59:10–01:01:20
Yeah, start with the ebook, which is a good resource. I think it’s around 100 pages, so it’s not a long read. Unlike some business books that are just a whole bunch of ideas and lists, we actually do it through the lens of a fictitious company called WellNest, which struggles with some of the same challenges that Rina’s laid out.

We’ve provided pathways for the key product management leaders at WellNest to actually improve some of those practices, partially through using some of the concepts that we teach at Productside.

It won’t take too long — it can be read in a session or two.

Download the Report and Upcoming Events

Kenny Kranseler | 01:01:20–01:03:40
Next, please download the full Product Management Maturity Report. Snap that QR code we put on the slide. It provides most of the insights that Rina has provided today, but even more — some of the cuts that we didn’t do as part of this webinar.

You’ll get lots of detail on ways to understand what’s going on in the market in general and compare and contrast, so you can at least empathize and feel confident that you’re not alone, that some of the challenges you might be facing from a product management perspective are out there in the world. You can start to see how others are challenged by it and potentially how they deal with it.

There’s more coming from Productside. There’s a panel discussion that I’m leading with some key product management leaders on what key playbook product leaders are going to take into 2026. There’ll be a big emphasis on AI and the impact of AI, both from a security perspective, a data perspective, as well as an experience perspective. We’ve got leaders in each of those realms to provide you some insight.

And if any of what we talked about in this webinar is interesting to you and you want to get really deep on it, we’ve got some classes coming up. One starts next Tuesday, so you need to get on it if you want to register — today is the last day of registration, so jump right on it. One of my co-workers, Dean, will lead you through that.

We’re also teaching the impact of AI on product management, and how to leverage AI to be a better product manager, starting in the middle of December. Then we’re going to take off for Optimal Product Management until the beginning of the year. I’m actually teaching a class in January, and Roger teaches one in February. If you happen to be in London in March, you can have Tom Evans give you a deep dive on Optimal Product Management live and in person.

Q&A: Low Maturity, Stakeholders, and Mentors

Rina Alexin | 01:03:40–01:04:10
Now we can go into our Q&A. If you have questions, please put them in chat or in the Q&A box. I’d love to take them at the end. We’ll leave time for Q&A.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:04:10–01:06:00
We got a couple of questions that you might be interested in, Rina.

Someone said, “I’m pretty confident that our team maturity is pretty low across the board, but some of it has to do with my organization. It’s not mature in product thinking in the rest of the departments and leadership. So what should I do?”

We see this a lot, where a product manager or IC feels they know how to do product but there are other things in the way — for example, sales having big clients where there’s a roadmap and that roadmap gets destroyed.

What should they do?

Rina Alexin | 01:06:00–01:08:00
Yeah, we see this a lot. There can be a product manager who feels they know how to do product, but it’s other things in the way. The answers of “we don’t do this well” are often, “it’s not that we don’t want to, but that we can’t.”

There’s no way to address that problem without having those conversations. The outcome-guided template we showed is a great one to start with, because it sounds like in those kinds of organizations there isn’t clarity on what the ultimate goals are that the company is trying to achieve, and how everybody in the organization builds on each other to achieve those goals.

Product is, as our old friend Joe Ghalli says, a team sport. The whole team has to be working together in order to achieve success. You have to define where you are rowing toward — what’s that destination — and how each team contributes to that positively, before you can really then address some of the challenges.

So start with that conversation about outcomes and shared goals.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:08:00–01:09:20
Yeah, and feel free to share some of those learnings around key outcome pieces with some of your stakeholders. What are we really trying to get at? Make sure they come at things from a problem perspective and not just a solution perspective.

So the next time you hear some feature request from your sales manager, your sales director, your VP of Sales, ask that question: what’s underlying the customer’s request for that specific feature? Understand what their problem is and make sure they go back and get some of that information as well.

Another question came up: “Did the survey include product marketing professionals?”

Rina Alexin | 01:09:20–01:10:00
Yes. We actually have a whole other category of people who have other job titles. So we do have that data, and I do believe that many respondents were in product marketing.

Because we wanted to focus the insights of this report on product managers and leaders, we put everyone else in another category. Those insights are also shared in the full report, but they weren’t the focal point here.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:10:00–01:11:20
Someone mentioned that they’re fairly early in their career. “How do I know if something’s good or great quality if I’m just a junior product manager?”

Rina Alexin | 01:11:20–01:13:00
That one’s hard, because you don’t know what you don’t know. We find that in our Skills Benchmark too. Sometimes junior PMs score themselves higher, and then they take the class and realize, “Oh, that’s what that meant,” and then they score lower.

I would say you learn that with experience. The shortcut is to test your assumptions with someone with more experience. Ask them: “Tell me how this is good” or “tell me how this is bad.” Go to your director, your VP, or somebody in your network — potentially a mentor. That’s where I would go first.

You can also probably use a chat-based AI coach to help you advance your thinking as well. That’s a good way to use generative AI to help you think, but I wouldn’t say generative AI is going to be your ultimate product coach. Mentors are important.

Mentors are key for junior product managers. When I’ve led large teams of product managers, one of the first things I tell new PMs is, “Find a mentor.” It’s a hard role, and it’s hard to get it right. If you have someone else who’s been there and done that, you can learn from them and they can help you assess your work.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:13:00–01:14:30
One of the things I often try to recommend — because it was told to me once and I thought it was a good idea — is to create a 3×3 matrix for yourself.

Three people who are more senior to you, three people who are your peers, and three people who are junior to you. If you can create those nine relationships, those are going to be the people that will help you grow in your career a lot faster.

The mentors will obviously be the ones with more experience, but you’d be surprised what you can learn from your peers. And you’d also be surprised how much you know by helping somebody else.

Rina Alexin | 01:14:30–01:15:40
Yes, exactly. The mentors will be those more senior people, but peers are incredibly valuable, and you’ll learn a lot by helping people junior to you. That 3×3 idea is a great way to structure your learning network.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:15:40–01:17:00
Another question: “If we get a low score across a whole bunch of areas, where do we start?”

As someone who’s having lots of challenges, what do they do first?

Rina Alexin | 01:17:00–01:18:40
When we work with our clients, this is frequently the case. This is a hard job, so it’s not surprising that some of these capabilities are quite low.

You need to select which one will move the needle the most for your organization — the area that you can see would have the biggest impact. Sometimes I pick two: one that’s really hard and one that’s low-hanging fruit, so you can have an early win and also challenge yourself.

That’s how I might prioritize.

Kenny Kranseler | 01:18:40–01:19:40
One of the ones I find helpful to start with is Context. As I said earlier, it’s the canvas you’re painting on. If you’ve got the wrong canvas, the paint’s not going to stick.

Make sure you get Context right, and then some of the other things will start to fall into place, because you have to have the right context for everything else to work effectively.

Rina Alexin | 01:19:40–01:20:40
That is true. But as I mentioned, sometimes you don’t have as much ability to change Context, and that might be a longer play. So maybe you do two things: work on Context over the long term, and in the near term start earlier in the process by focusing on Discover/Investigate.

Don’t start with Deliver. As we’ve said, that won’t get you there. You have to get the earlier work done well.

Closing Remarks

Kenny Kranseler | 01:20:40–01:22:00
I think we’ve hit the end of the hour. I want to thank you, Rina, for a compelling presentation.

I want to thank everybody for their attention throughout the session. As noted, you will get links to a replay if you want to share this with some of your co-workers that didn’t have a chance to view it, and you’ll also get links to take your own Team Assessment and to some of the templates and Playbook examples that we shared.

So thank you very much and have a wonderful day and a wonderful rest of the year.

Rina Alexin | 01:22:00–01:22:20
Thanks everyone. Cheers.