The 2024 Global Product Management Skills Benchmark Report

Introduction: Welcome to the 2024 Global Benchmark Report Webinar

Robyn Brooks | 00:00–02:20

all right uh welcome everyone uh to our 2024 Global Benchmark report uh webinar and uh I am Robyn Brooks uh this I’m joined by our CEO uh Rina um I’m director of product here and Rina uh would you like to introduce yourself

Rina Alexin | 00:00–02:20

yeah sure hi everyone welcome to today’s webinar my name is Rina Alexin I’m the CEO of 280 group I have a background in business uh worked at McKenzie worked at MetLife uh now I’ve been running 280 group for the past just over five years uh and really excited to talk to you all today about our amazing Benchmark report

Robyn Brooks | 00:00–02:20

excellent thank you Rina so a little bit about 280 group we are an outcome driven product partner and we really focus on helping product teams transform um and build products that people want to buy and use so um we have uh complete Solutions uh we can tailor uh the content to your context um and our team of Consultants is uh is world class um so uh that’s a little bit about 280 group

I do want to encourage you all throughout the webinar to ask questions so you’ll see that there is a live chat um you’re welcome to interact with us uh we want to keep this conversational but you’ll also notice that there is a Q&A button if you click that and ask a question we’ll actually save time at the end to address those questions and uh and chat through those uh as well so if you have a question as we’re going through or you have a specific skill set that you’re really interested in improving and want to know how you can improve please use that Q&A button and uh and let us know

Rina Alexin | 00:00–02:20

yeah and actually we like to keep these really interactive uh if we see a relevant question come through when we’re on a specific slide we’ll actually pause and answer it right there so feel free no question goes unnoticed by us so uh just continue to interact

Robyn Brooks | 00:00–02:20

absolutely and the the most common question we get is will this be recorded yes and you will get a link to the recording after the session please also connect with us on LinkedIn um you see the link in the QR code here we share leadership best practices uh we discuss the importance of product management you can network with your peers we have a very large group there um please join us and uh keep the conversation going after the webinar

Who’s Joining: Live Poll & Attendee Breakdown

Robyn Brooks | 02:20–04:10

all right so we’ve introduced ourselves we would like to get to know who is joining us today as well so um please let us know we’re going to launch the poll here and this really helps us know how to guide the discussion if we see a lot of leaders or or people earlier in their career um we just want to make sure that the information we share today is relevant

Rina Alexin | 02:20–04:10

and also just I kind of mentioned it or quipped about it uh at the start but Robyn and I also recorded a podcast uh introducing this Benchmark report so we go a little bit more into depth uh across our uh our entire report so if you have additional questions you can always also reach out to us directly on LinkedIn feel free to follow us as well that’s also another great spot to get some more information

Robyn Brooks | 02:20–04:10

absolutely okay all right looks like we’ve had most folks respond and pretty good mix lots of uh individual contributors senior product managers um directors VP and a couple of others so if you if you said other please let us know in the chat that would be great

What Is the Benchmark Report & Why It Matters

Robyn Brooks | 04:10–08:00

all right o going a little bit far so um the agenda today is first I’m going to be going over what is about our Benchmark report we’re going to go over the key results and findings and then some insights uh for everyone

I want to get started by saying at 280 group we have a unique vantage point for the community any product leader if you think about it has the ability to see you know maybe half a dozen to 10 teams or organizations perform we do that on a daily basis and so at our company what we try to do is get all of the insights across all of the different teams and companies that we work with and bring that not just into our content and our courses but also share it right back to the community because we get to see some very interesting things across Industries companies all of that

uh and in fact our uh survey that we are presenting here today from our uh business so we used to do this kind of survey for our private clients exclusively because it gives us a a perspective on where their teams are performing where there are opportunities and when we go in and work with the team we like to even ask managers what are your expectations of the team and then track where are the skill sets on your team in comparison to that expectation and that’s really really powerful it’s been one of the most enlightening tools tools for us at our organization and we use it across uh a lot of our engagements because again it gives us so much information

and that’s why in 2018 way back in 2018 we decided to take this to the market and bring this kind of information to each individual product manager it’s a little different when you’re an individual taking this survey what you gain is the insight for your own career uh it helps you understand where are your gaps and what this Benchmark report now does for you is also gives you Insight across product management what are the expectations at a director level what are the expectations in an industry and so it’s a really really great tool for anybody to use whether you’re a leader or a product manager you want to get into product management because it really helps you become much more strategic about your career and the skills that you invest in

Methodology: How the Assessment Was Designed

Robyn Brooks | 08:00–11:10

so uh if you haven’t yet please take the skills assessment if you’re a leader I really recommend having your team go through it uh everybody gets their own individual report but you as a manager without even us uh you can actually just uh potentially collect them or use them in your one-on-ones to just help guide that discussion for um for their career

in terms of this report just a little bit about the methodology it’s a self assessment so we had to be very thoughtful about our design uh as I hope many of you know surveys are complicated um and to get to the right results you need to understand how are you asking how are you phrasing the questions what kind of wording do you use and so we because this is a self assessment and it’s a typical 1 to 10 point scale um we wanted to give more insight into how what is a three mean what does a five mean to try to get more accurate data

if you take a self assessment and you score yourself all 10 you get excluded from our Benchmark report and it probably is not very valuable for you uh I mean I don’t think there are people with all tens nor should there be because there tends to be some kind of specialization but just for everybody here to understand the thought that went into it it’s pretty scientific um and it’s pretty robust survey

Demographics & Industry Representation

Robyn Brooks | 11:10–12:25

terms of demographics uh we have a lot of different kinds of people taking it these are just to share when you download the report you can actually dig into the numbers we also share a little bit about Industries we have a lot of people from software Insurance Financial Services taking it um if you’re leader and interested in uh the breakdown by industry uh then you can take a look at the Benchmark report uh you can also shoot us a line sometimes we’re able to also compile that data uh on an industry basis

Poll: Which Skill PMs Want to Improve Most

Robyn Brooks | 12:25–15:20

all right so we’re going to get into the meat of it and first we want to launch another poll uh and that’s just to ask if you could only choose one which skill would you go for uh in improving next year so um can we launch yeah there we go um and the skills I’m very curious about this one I’m going to see how many choose number five it’s been a pretty big topic of discussion across our community hasn’t it Robyn it really has okay wow all right I am pretty surprised at some of these responses okay all right can we end the poll let’s go ahead share yeah okay so this is really surprising that market research received a zero market research is one of the top uh priorities that we hear from product leaders uh that they want to be doing more of but I’m very curious to find out why um nobody wants to invest in that skill as their top priority uh very interesting yeah all right not to lots of interest in AI and strategy which is good which is good yeah yeah all right so um again uh just as a reminder feel free to use Q&A I see some questions coming in um we’ll try to again we’ll leave time at the end but we want to engage with you all so if you have questions please um don’t be shy

Strongest Product Management Skill Sets

Robyn Brooks | 15:20–20:21

all right so uh in terms of key insights um so first is the strongest skill sets uh this has think has been pretty consistent whenever we release a benchmark report domain knowledge tends to be the skill set that people rate themselves the highest um a lot of confidence around domain and the insight here and this is something that I brought to other product leaders is that domain knowledge is also one of the easiest skill sets to teach it takes years it really does it it does take time in certain complex Industries um it requires a a new person coming in in um really talking to a lot of different kinds of people in a company but domain knowledge can be taught some of these other skills are really challenging to teach

uh so customer understanding really in depth like empathizing with the customer uh active listening skills they okay all of these skills can be taught but some of them tend to be harder the other reason why we find domain knowledge to be one of the highest is that often times the product managers coming in into the profession are coming from the industry so they tend to have a high domain knowledge because they were in a different role in a company and then at some point anointed product manager

uh the caution here is although this is great to have a strong skill set in domain knowledge it should not be the only skill that you are confident in because there could be biases that result as a you from from your uh personal career path when you’re coming in from the industry and so sometimes having an outsider’s point of view can be very valuable too what do you think Robyn

Robyn Brooks | 15:20–20:21

I actually we have a question that came in that I think is really uh important right now it’s very relevant um I started in another department at my company so I have domain knowledge but I’m trying to learn PM skills fast what’s the most important skill to focus on

Rina Alexin | 15:20–20:21

oh man I think you might get different answers depending on who you ask um but I will say that it okay it depends on what stage in the career you’re in uh when you are an individual contributor I mean honestly starting with a customer first uh and learning some of the technical uh things that you’re going to be expected to do what is a great requirement how do you write that those are technical aspects that I think earlier in your career you would be expected to do really well so I would start somewhere there

uh well actually take the skills assessment first understand where your gaps are and then um try to in our benchmark report we actually do include some insight into what earlier career product manager is supposed to be good at uh and then as you are progressing in your career it’s it’s a strategy and process that tends to be the most needed and it makes sense right the later on you are in your career um the more you were expected to set direction set vision uh and then set the terms of execution of that vision

Robyn do you have a different answer

Robyn Brooks | 15:20–20:21

no I think that’s I think that’s good we actually talked about this a little bit on the podcast as well so um it really and uh someone in the chat also mentioned um that it also really depends on what department you came from right so what what skills you already have um I would focus on you know leading into the skills that you come with right that’s good that’s going to give you a starting place and then get curious you know about what uh what what you see others doing that you don’t know how to do yet and ask you know most most most people on product teams are really useful and helpful and willing to help um the uh uh their team members uh grow their skills

Rina Alexin | 15:20–20:21

I love it you actually I don’t know if you saw but we had a comment just come in from Michael that said it’s also dependent on the function exactly completely true agreed totally

Weakest Product Management Skills

Rina Alexin | 20:21–25:40

all right so we’re going to move on to the weakest skill sets uh and this one has also been fairly consistent so it really is telling uh for us that product managers in general they do tend to feel less confident in uh skill sets of end of life pricing and competitive analysis I will say that these are the some of the hardest things to get right and sometimes the lack of experience of running through an end of life process results in a lower understanding of what it takes to be great at end of life

uh the one on here and then pricing I think sometimes you know we we do work with teams which are not directly responsible for pricing um if you’re working on an internal team typically you know value based metrics rather than pricing type metrics are more important here but the one that’s really surprising for me especially given that we just heard that people are not that interested in their market research skills is the competitive analysis um part

uh because competitive analysis and I’ve seen it in so many organizations they think they did it but they did it once a few years ago and because this is one of those skills that I think you get a lot of information about what your Market is asking for now again we don’t say follow your competition you follow your markets you follow your customers but uh you still get a lot of information great information from doing a really thorough competitive analysis

uh and this requires practice and requires attention and it requires doing it more than just once a year um but I know the demands of the product manager role and I understand why sometimes this does get put to the bottom

Robyn Brooks | 20:21–25:40

we actually had a question just come in as well about pricing um for in a B2B space it’s a challenge to find competitors pricing listed anywhere would love to know what you recommend here

Rina Alexin | 20:21–25:40

yeah okay um oh Robyn do you wanna

Robyn Brooks | 20:21–25:40

no no

Rina Alexin | 20:21–25:40

okay that sorry I just saw you you mark yeah so uh we we talk a lot about SaaS pricing especially in our digital product manager course uh what we okay just as I kind of said it earlier you’ll find a lot of information out on the market uh even if you can’t directly view your competitive uh pricing information especially in a B2B space you’ll get some feedback in the in engaging with your sales team around what are they hearing in the market

um there are different ways uh to get an inside information around uh competitive pricing um and in the end what you should be focused on within pricing strategies is understanding the value metrics that you have in your product because your competitive uh offerings so the the offerings of your competition are probably going to have different types of features that they’re optimizing for because they hear some kind of different message from the market that they’re trying to um go after

and so you need to understand what is valuable about your product your feature set that is creating the outcomes for your clients and then work um there’s a number of different ways that you could test with pricing but like understanding that first is is how you get to the SaaS pricing it’s not necessarily doing the competitive analysis though again there are ways to do that

Robyn Brooks | 20:21–25:40

yeah a good place to start I would just add is is win/loss and churn analysis right find out if you are losing on price or if you’re losing for other reasons um because it’s really easy to focus on price when that might not actually be the problem

um so pricing is important but it is a piece of the puzzle and uh and that’s where I I really find that win/loss analysis and churn analysis if you can talk to customers who’ve left or who purchased a competitor um a lot of times they’ll tell you why and it might be price it might not

Rina Alexin | 20:21–25:40

yeah and I I’ll be honest I am not opposed to secret shoppers too so um there there are ways to get pricing there are sneaky ways yeah secret shopping is a good one it it also really just depends on the type of product that you have right and how um what the competitive landscape looks like yeah great question Alan thank you so much

Promotion Path Insights (Early PM → Senior PM → Director)

Rina Alexin | 25:40–32:00

all right so now we are going to go into some insights um and we’re I see some more questions coming in from chat uh but uh what we want to share because we did see that there are people that are earlier in their career we want to share some of the insights from our benchmark report about your promotion path

um so one of the first things that we notice because we are um so in terms of our demographic data for the survey we try to separate early career from midcareer to later career including director and then VP level and so on and so that gives us really cool insights uh around what is expected you could think of it this way like what is expected of me later on in my career and it’s no surprise that when you’re earlier in your career again you don’t have all the experience of doing um the activities that are behind these skills so you’re going to test lower but there are going to be significant improvements as you continue on your career

in terms of uh the new PM to senior PM some of the biggest uh improvements are end of life PM processes and marketing and launch again I think that has to do with when you are in a product team and you’re working through things you’re going to get more exposure to these skills now

uh I don’t remember Robyn do you have it up around um when a product leader is hiring for maybe you could find that while we go through to the director because I want to just share the the rest of this data

Robyn Brooks | 25:40–32:00

sure

Rina Alexin | 25:40–32:00

and when you’re in the senior PM role and you’re looking for a director role this also should come as no surprise it’s going to be more expected of you to understand and I said it earlier um the strategy piece so marketing launch remains really really critical and also just to kind of note from our experience in working with clients on engagements go-to-market is one of the challenges of doing product management really well

uh from especially when you are in an environment where you have multiple products you have a product portfolio the go-to-market piece is not just about launching the product it’s a lot of the the skills that if you have a product marketing uh organization you’re often working with them but sometimes you’re not and so it’s it’s like the go-to-market strategy the sales enablement what happens after you launch is also very very important and sometimes disjointed

um so think about if I’m in a director role I’m going to be responsible for working cross functionally with my peers so the it’s not just having the skill set it’s what are the expectations and activities around that skill set when you are a more senior level so uh that’s I think that’s some of the insight that I wanted to share uh when you’re thinking about your own career to also just be thoughtful okay it’s not just what I’m doing today it’s how do I progress in my role today to set me up for success for that role that I want in the future

I also asterisk not everybody needs to be a director not everybody needs to be a manager uh not everybody wants to be a manager right it’s a very different role to be a director of product versus a product manager and there are fantastic fantastic product managers where they are career product managers they love the work of a product manager as an individual contributor uh rather than uh managing the work of others so I did want to also say that not everybody needs a path to director

um we also do see some people do want to know this so that’s why we’re sharing this information

Discussion: Data, Domain Needs, and AI Skills

Rina Alexin | 32:00–35:11

okay uh in terms of another question I saw someone from Walter around where does data analytics stack so uh we do have a separate skills uh benchmark where we focus on the digital space including data and analytics uh we do have data um throughout a lot of these skill sets because data is it’s like an input uh into a lot of um the other marketing sorry the other product management activities around business skills forecasting pricing and market research and so it’s not called out here uh as its own skill I think we do call it out in our um other um skills report uh and it’s it is super important but it’s kind of like important everywhere that’s why we have questions um across these 15 skill dimensions around data okay good question

How to Improve PM Skills (Training, Discovery, Strategy)

Rina Alexin | 35:11–39:40

all right so we did ask uh we did get asked how do I improve my skills uh I’m going to again all of these have asterisks I like to put my own color yes uh we do provide some training uh and we do it because it’s valuable training does improve skills across the board we know this because when we work I mentioned it earlier we work with private uh on our private engagements we do measure the before and after

uh and here is the important piece it’s not just about the promotion path when you’re a product leader and you’re looking across your team uh the reason why training is so valuable is because if you have different team players who end up being more um I guess subject matter experts in a certain skill everyone goes to them like pricing for example everybody has somebody on the team that could be very naturally good at understanding pricing they they love numbers so they are more talented in that field now that person gets all of the questions around pricing directed at them and so the other way in which training improves skill sets is that it kind of helps even out the skill sets on the team there’s still going to be outliers on every team but it helps everyone come up to a baseline understanding of what’s expected of them so that they can actually become much more effective in their role and that person who’s really great at pricing now gets to do more of their job instead of just always answering questions for the rest of their team it’s something that we see over and over again in our engagements

Robyn Brooks | 35:11–39:40

exactly and it’s it it is natural as Rina mentioned earlier for there to be some specialization over time right so it’s great to have a pricing expert on your team as long as they’re not doing everyone’s pricing right yeah so having that that that sort of baseline um set of skills uh for the for the whole team does allow people to both specialize and be more effective

Rina Alexin | 35:11–39:40

okay uh so did you I I did want to bring up the how do I hire for PM yeah some point okay this is just another data point that we test this all the time um just to understand what is the market in terms of um how many people have received training how many people have not and general what we have seen is some increase uh in demand for training uh and then I know in our benchmark report which I’m pretty proud of is that uh 280 group’s product training actually uh sets higher level of increase in skills than other people’s training but that’s just me can’t help it

Poll: Does Your Org Use a Product Process?

Rina Alexin | 39:40–42:50

uh while Robyn’s looking up that information let’s launch this next poll about product process so the question here is does your organization use a consistent product process and this is one of those times where I like I want to have conversations with the people here one my favorite things to do is just talk product all day with the product people so thank you guys for joining us today

all right uh okay so I’m gonna end the poll because I think we got a lot of people answering I’m going to share the results um okay I’m actually not surprised to see a good amount of people say that there is some process but mostly focused on delivery I think that’s telling of our times so uh in general what we have found is that typically there is process on delivery uh there is less process or less understanding of what needs to get done earlier in the product uh management cycle so during the investigate discovery phases there could be ad hoc ways in which people experiment in which people analyze the data if they have access to it

uh and I do see out in the market right now there is just more and more focus on delivery now it does make sense uh I mean we hear it uh where are the results where is the thing that we are shipping because that thing that we are shipping oftentimes leaders and the C-suite believes that that is tied to revenue if we ship if we just ship 10 more things we’re going to get like 10x more revenue and the problem here is that while yes it’s great to have process and great to have delivery it’s not and we say it and I’m think I’m speaking I’m like preaching to the choir here it’s not just about shipping the thing it’s shipping the right thing uh and that requires thoughtful approach on what is a process in which we figure out and make those decisions because the decisions on what we are working on are ever more important than just that we are working

Robyn Brooks | 39:40–42:50

yeah that that can that can be difficult to socialize right across the organization if stakeholders are very focused on delivery it’s no surprise that your process would be mainly focused on delivery and it’s okay to focus on that for a while um to get good at shipping things but it’s also important to make sure you are shipping the right things right that’s why a lot of products fail um if you’re very focused on that um with without putting an equal investment in um pressure testing uh that you’re that you are building the right next thing and that it’s going to be valuable to your customers

Why Product Process Matters

Rina Alexin | 42:50–52:00

yeah and another point on socializing uh this is again for those who are interested in the career path to director and above again that is really going to be I think PM process is one of those skills that are is ever more important the more senior you get one because you’re establishing process you’re trying to optimize it and you’re also going to be responsible for cross-departmental sharing of the process and that the point here is to create a product-like culture in your organization is to bring everybody along for the journey of why things are happening why decisions are being made at what point are they being made how are they being tested and validated uh and process helps with all of that in fact process helps with just about all skills I think that’s the point we’re trying to make here and something that we test over and over again with our own engagements

so we also saw uh in terms of uh how prevalent are product management processes now the audience here uh I think nobody said that no there is no process at all that’s good news because across the whole landscape that we have surveyed typically about a third do not have any process okay I’ve said process so many times um in even in a small company we have a process and the reason again is because it lifts um it it elevates the product team and it helps everybody get on the same page of what is happening and why and it’s so important because when there’s that saying of you can’t unknow what you already know and product managers they live in the center of most of the knowledge you know we we mentioned data data is so important you get a lot more of it than many of your other colleagues in other departments now everybody does have some data marketing has some data sales teams obviously they have some data they think sometimes they have the most data because they talk to customers every day

uh but the product team is the consumer of a lot of different data points in the organization and that is why uh their role when when that is happening is so valuable for a company because the decisions that need to be made are going to be much better informed when they’re made by the people who are consuming information having a framework in which they’re able to analyze that information validate what is true understand the risks and make those decisions that is the job of the product manager that is the ultimate job and so that is why think about if you’re in a company if you’re one of the people that’s elected we do have process but to focus on delivery yes good need to work on the other part because the value of your role is less about the delivery

okay because and I I did this I think I posted this on LinkedIn okay project management salaries are 50% of product manager salaries yeah not that delivery is not valuable it’s just that that is a skill set that can be had the bigger skill set guess that I was being asked to before is is really the customer understanding piece of really understanding why are you making these decisions to begin with and you can’t do that without a good process and you can’t do that without a good skill okay I’m off my soapbox here

Robyn Brooks | 42:50–52:00

Rob did you want to add something

no I think you covered it yeah it’s it is important um to to make sure that you’re balancing the skills if for no other reason if you’re on a team where you’re really either focused on delivery or you don’t have a really solid process um having everyone aligned so they know what’s expected and they know how to do that um consistently is it’s half the battle right

Rina Alexin | 42:50–52:00

yeah exactly and so uh now make no mistake this this um chart is one chart that I like to point to uh when I talk to product leaders they’re not necessarily understanding the value of process and why we care about it so much because from our point of view and all of the engagements that we work with the reason what makes our company so special is we do both right we view training really as a articulation of what’s expected of product managers so that we lift skills by making sure everybody’s on the same page as to what is expected and what they’re supposed to be doing and uh the data doesn’t lie

uh when you have no process typically product managers uh find that they do not perform at the same level as peers that do um even an ad hoc process which I would categorize some unfinished process um the ones that really are very strong here uh tend to operate in organizations that understand product management that have a product-focused culture which understands why product managers are making the decisions that they are and where that is missing the reason why you’re also seeing lower skill sets and overall confidence in their role is because you end up having a lot of these little battles with other departments um in these situations so uh typical one is just defending the strategic part of the job that I just was talking about how it’s so valuable it’s so valuable to know your personas it’s so valuable to have time to do that competitive analysis because you’re supposed to be consuming this information so you can make really informed decisions but if you have to defend why are you spending time talking to customers uh running interviews running these experiments some of them fail right instead of just shipping the 100 item list that’s on somebody’s wish list

uh if you have to defend that you’re going to be stuck in a solution-oriented feature-based Factory team and you are it’s just it’s just no surprise um you’re going to be less effective and less successful in the ultimate role of the product manager

52:00 Benefits of Strong PM Process (Data, End-of-Life, Launch)

Rina Alexin | 52:00–57:40

so benefits of PM process uh here uh now some of this you know I’m I’m beyond data uh end of life PM process competitive analysis they get the most improvement yes um but that’s also because they are some of the weakest so the improvement level right the denominator is lower so it’s going to be a higher improvement level but you see that that um that yellow the size of the yellow bar is something else to focus on

uh however what I like to point to is that even the skills that are strong get a boost communication gets a boost and I think in what I’ve found in talking to different product leaders is that even if communication gets rated pretty high like people think that they’re good at it the demands of communication has have gone up uh since every everybody became I mean product teams have been remote before but usually they were remote with the development usually was uh was somewhere offshore

uh now much more remote teams much more coordination much more communication and if you know what you’re supposed to be working on why and when which is the benefit of process uh it’s much easier to understand how to communicate with the rest of your teams so again feel like I’m talking a lot about this but I really care about it I’ve seen the improvements where we’ve installed uh went from you know no formal process very delivery focused for example to having um to having an understanding of what product manager what the role is what the strategy is having uh having again process around it

uh yielded just incredible results like one of our clients they they they had a crazy $500 million gain in valuation just from inputting this that’s why I care about it so much and that’s why I’m hope I’m speaking to the product leaders here today where they’re you know they’re understanding your role is so valuable in your organization you can unlock so much value um if you focus on this if there’s nothing else that you could take away from it ironically from a skills benchmark report is invest in your team and invest in the things that you’re asking them to do which is the process

okay uh Robyn any uh any questions or anything that we can answer

Robyn Brooks | 52:00–57:40

no if you want um we can talk about uh the the data point that you wanted to talk about before which was the skills when hiring a product manager

Rina Alexin | 52:00–57:40

let let’s do it so this is also really important

Hiring for PM Roles: Skills to Test

Rina Alexin | 57:40–1:03:10

yeah so if you go to the next slide it should be there for you

oh great oh look at that you added it just in time

uh okay so uh skills to look for when hiring a product manager since we did have a number of you WR that you are in the leadership roles um this is also good information to know if you are trying to get into product uh or earlier in your career uh this is what we found uh should be tested for in an interview basis because we find that candidates um these are the skills that candidates tend to score a little bit weaker on some of these are more of that hard skills that we’ve been talking about

uh and here’s my advice uh I don’t know if I said this in the podcast or not but uh in any interview process know what you’re trying to test for and then have a test in your interview so this may be something you do live right you might need to you might need to give some kind of case study or information uh and then you ask them to do some analysis or and this is also pretty helpful you ask to see past work

uh this is this happens in a lot of different Industries I don’t know if it happens I’m encouraging to happen also in product management um it’s how do I put this uh designers marketing folks they tend to have portfolios they tend to have portfolios and they’re able to share with future employers what their portfolio is and that de-risks that decision for the leader and the decision for the leader to get the risk for product

you need to have a portfolio that’s what I’m trying to say it’s think about your own career what work product now you have to know company confidential information I’m not saying you know don’t do any of that um but think about your portfolio your work that you’re able to share and then you know just edit it so that it’s it hides um company confidential information

Robyn Brooks | 57:40–1:03:10

yeah it’s important to think about this in real time too right so as you’re working on something if you if you’ve done um uh a market research analysis that you’re proud of you know there’s ways you can sanitize that data to say here’s the improvement that that this resulted in right um here’s how it changed the strategy that we were working on

um but you do have to be thoughtful about saving those artifacts in a way that you know doesn’t doesn’t uh expose any company confidential information

Rina Alexin | 57:40–1:03:10

okay thank you Robyn um I just saw a question come in uh everyone on my team does their work efficiently but there’s some difference so they’re talking about the confusion with stakeholders um how do I get everybody aligned I’m not sure where to start what do you think Robyn

Robyn Brooks | 57:40–1:03:10

um you know this is this is this is a question that I think comes up for everyone right at some point in your career maybe you’re an individual contributor or maybe you’re just stepping into a senior or a leadership role and you see everyone working and they’re they got their heads down they’re getting their job done but you know one product manager does uh does something a little differently than another product manager and then the stakeholders get confused I’ve seen this really often

um and one thing to focus on I mean coming back to process having everyone aligned you know there’s a reason why Rina and I value that so much um having everyone aligned on a process so if you’re individual contributor we have resources free resources available um for for download on our website you can use to get you started

um we highly recommend that you you talk to your leadership talk to your peers find out um if there are members of your team that uh that are um you know that are kind of stronger in different areas might recommend hey let’s align on this process if you really struggle to kind of get everyone aligned um then come talk to us you know it’s it we would love to help

Rina Alexin | 57:40–1:03:10

yeah um so okay in our engagements I’m going to talk to this question in our engagements uh so the top three that tend to come out uh roles and responsibilities a strategy and then stakeholder alignment um so confusion stakeholders uh happens in so many different organizations and I think Robyn just hit it on the head uh it’s people are confused because if people are doing things differently that means you don’t have consistency and not having consistency is super common

um it’s common because teams change people change on teams and so sometimes onboarding and training new people doesn’t happen appropriately uh it’s really really helpful to have a visible playbook um by which your entire team understands what you’re doing at every phase of a product’s life cycle

uh and if you don’t have one uh there are a lot of resources I obviously am biased we have a playbook uh that uh we use internally in our team and we help implement it uh at organizations uh you need to get on the same page usually do a RACI discussion like a RACI or DACI whichever one you use um to get roles and responsibilities ironed out and then figure out like just even put something simple on a Miro or a Mural board in terms of what are the activities that we do and then what do we expect from other organizations

uh and those can change depending on what kind of product or service you’re working on uh but at least it’s something to start and then bring stakeholders into that conversation as well

um because yeah oh we had a question come in you you mentioned R Alan asked of regarding alignment with stakeholders what is your experience with or specific recommendations of RACI RAPID or any kind of roles Matrix is it useful is it busy work

I think it can become busy work it it really just depends on the problem you’re you’re solving with it right how much you need to invest with it um we find that something simple is usually best uh so I I mean we use I believe we use a RACI internally and we do it across different teams and here is why it’s not busy work or how how it can be not busy work is if you get the entire team talking about it

um so what we view these role matrices are really just a starting point for discussions uh and um it’s really it it does it’s it’s in the discussion that it’s valuable and again having that set on your team um it could be the product team and it could be um so just the people product manager titles and then it could be the product team like overall like who is involved and getting a product to market and getting all the stakeholders in a room just understanding hey this is where we are here’s the expectations

I’m going to say that it’s it’s more valuable than you think because those conversations are not happening and that is why people get misaligned or confused they’re just they might happen something like I said earlier with competitive analysis they might happen once and then never again uh and then teams change and then yeah

and that’s that’s I think what what the takeaway is it’s not busy work if you use it if you sit everybody down and fill out a RACI chart and then you you know pin it to a corkboard and never look at it again it wasn’t useful but if it does provoke conversation within the team and with your stakeholders and it makes it ends up resulting in valuable change and better alignment it is absolutely invaluable yeah great question

Q&A: Pricing, AI, Skills, Stakeholders

Rina Alexin | 1:03:10–1:11:30

all right uh so um I did want to show this up this also is in our benchmark report uh some of the benefits of product management transformation so it’s like the why so why is it important to invest in your team and your skills in your process it’s it’s really to get better results right now and I’m in talking with product leaders they’re being tasked with how do we get revenue today a lot of companies have the the discussion of we need it today we need revenue we need profit

uh and you can’t really do that if your team is completely ad hoc and misaligned you really need to invest in what you’re all expected to do because unfortunately if you don’t understand the value that I was talking about before around how product teams bring value to the organization which is in making really good decisions about what work gets done then it’s not as valuable

uh the other way that I’d like to think about it is that uh we we used to have this slide where the product manager is basically at the center of all the other departments uh because they interface just with just about everybody else at the company and so there some of the most valuable people in any organization when they are allowed and empowered to do their job and they know what how to do it and they do it well they’re some of the most valuable people in the organization because again they’re making a lot of the decisions that is an input into a lot of other people’s work like marketing now has to market the product

um sales has to sell the product engineering has to build the product there’s a lot of other people’s work that gets decided um and so it’s a decision making ability that is so so important and you can’t make decisions if you’re not a person who’s curious um who knows how to learn who knows how to experiment and who knows how to gather all the information necessary to make the decision

now I’m not saying okay there could also be decision paralysis but uh good product managers they know how to get enough information out from the market out from internal stakeholders to make good decisions

uh and uh we also know this um really helps with employee retention because nothing is going to scare your best talent away as much as feeling like they are screaming into a void of they know what they’re supposed to be doing and they’re not doing their fun work so uh in terms of uh employee retention and engagement um having a product management team that is empowered that knows what they’re supposed to be doing and is able to do it really well is super super valuable for any organization

uh as we uh just are starting to wrap up again um I see a couple more questions but we’ll leave time right now I just wanted to say um if you haven’t yet we did go over a lot of the insights but download the product management skills benchmark report here’s a QR code

uh we are going to be doing this every year because it’s so so valuable the insights that we get um from the product community we want to bring it back to the product community um so please download it uh let us know what you think as well just uh follow us on LinkedIn and shoot us comments engage with us

um ask questions because as we do the next iteration uh if you’re curious about something we could ask more questions or different questions of our product community and bring that again back to you

uh and um as a special because you have attended this webinar uh we have a current promotion running uh for the code Benchmark 2024 you get 15% off any of our upcoming classes you see some of our great people um who are here listed uh who are running our upcoming courses I’m going to I can’t pick favorites here unfortunately but I will say that Roger was my trainer um and man they’re all so good

uh they really are they really are they all they’re they’re so good um Roger’s great Joe’s great Tom is great um they are all very different and they all bring their heart and soul to these in to these training sessions

uh please also follow them on LinkedIn uh you’ll see if you if you are a 280 group fan you’ll see that we often drop videos featuring some of our trainers and um they have so much knowledge to share um with the product community they’re just fantastic people so absolutely

all right time for Q&A so um let’s I see a couple questions again if you want to ask some more questions of things that we didn’t cover today uh please just feel free to use the Q&A button or the chat uh but we can get started with just a few that are here right now

okay great all right um I had a question come in about pricing and we’ve seen this uh again how so um finance controls our pricing how do I improve this skill set when I don’t have any ability to influence it yeah okay so we hear this a lot um and we hear it not just finance controls skill set but I mentioned it earlier if you’re an internal team uh that uh sometimes you don’t have a pricing you have more of the value metrics yeah if you’re a a platform product manager for example we get that a lot how do I how do I work on this skill when my product really is an internal product used by the other product but it doesn’t have its own pricing

yeah so I think that there’s still a lot of information that you can get from your product when it’s currently priced again I think Robyn mentioned it doing the win/loss analysis um helps there’s just other things that you could be doing around pricing to understand the value that your product is bringing uh to the market and there’s always the opportunity to go talk to whoever you think is in finance that is is running pricing analysis and take them out to virtual coffee or in-person lunch and just say I really want to understand your thought process

this is super valuable by the way if you can get a really good finance person to share with you how they think about pricing um I think I think you can learn a lot uh I I really even if you currently do pricing I still encourage try to find in your network somebody who’s finance minded um and and see see what they say

Robyn Brooks | 1:03:10–1:11:30

yeah and I want to I want to just double click on the the the measuring value right because if you are a platform product manager or you’re working on an internal product used by your company right it doesn’t have a price but every product and every technology that you work on building has a value so if you think about and kind of substitute the word price for value how do I measure the value of my product and is it delivering on internal efficiency improvement is it improving the the user experience of the um of the of my internal customers right

um in order to build the right products that have the right value you need to be thinking about what problems are they solving um and that goes right back to the strategy conversation right so there is a way to measure your product’s value even if you don’t directly influence its price

Rina Alexin | 1:03:10–1:11:30

thanks Robyn so I see a question here from Ben uh about AI it’s like AI is everywhere these days so where can I learn about AI Robyn what do you think

Robyn Brooks | 1:03:10–1:11:30

uh you know there’s it it changes all the time um so really it’s important to think about um AI in the context if you’re thinking about it in your product right we see a lot of there’s kind of three categories that I think about AI where you have people that are really wanting to be an AI PM right I’m going to go work on building a large language model I’m going to be implementing these Technologies I’m going to work closely with data scientists and I’m really going to be focusing on the technology itself that is one type of AI role

um but that’s sort of this sliver of the market and then you’ve obviously got um people who are thinking about how to how to just use AI to do product management better right we’ve done a couple of webinars on those um I recommend go look going and looking at that we talk about kind of how you can incorporate that into your product management operational model but the biggest thing that I see is I work on a product that isn’t AI but how do I evaluate whether I should put it in my product or not how do I do that and that really comes down to good product discovery the strategy how am I going to look at the overall market right if I’m working on a B2B product do am I selling into a space where if I put AI on my product I wouldn’t be able to sell it there because of the rapidly changing regulatory space right

so there’s a lot to consider I would say the first step is just kind of giving yourself a primer on what the technology is if you’re not super familiar with it kind of what the different how the regulatory landscape is changing and then really just investing it all comes back to doing effective product discovery every time there’s a disruptive technology and we see this every few years there’s a big disruptive technology um it it comes down to the same the same product management principles and skills um that you use to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for your product

Rina Alexin | 1:03:10–1:11:30

yeah I was gonna I’m just going to Echo something that Robyn said first of all we do have a couple great webinars um on the topic um they’re hosted I think often by Dean Peters so someone else you should follow one of our fantastic trainers

uh so I will say that um in talking so that’s something else that I’m talking to a lot of product leaders about AI um and a lot the other thing to note is not everybody I think Robyn you kind of mentioned it not everyone is going to be tasked with bringing AI internally so uh the other kind of skill set is how do I evaluate um AI from other companies because not every like if you’re working if you’re a product manager for example at a financial company uh where there is a lot of regulation it’s unlikely you’re going to be building something homegrown but you may be needing somebody else’s technology

um and there’s a lot of different kinds of AI I think right now most of the time we’re talking about generative AI but there’s been AI in the market for a number of years it’s just I think there’s just some more of a commercial um person or people facing type technology right now with generative AI um that’s been really interesting

okay I think we are uh may have time for just one more question thanks for bringing those questions in and then we’ll we’ll wrap

okay okay um okay this one’s really interesting uh I’m currently a product owner focused mainly on delivery but I’m more interested in product strategy how can I improve my skills in a way that demonstrates I’m ready for that promotion

oh man okay yeah uh where do we’re going to start okay so I think this has to do with what I spoke about earlier where there are and and we’re seeing this and we’ve we’ve seen this but I feel like we’re seeing it even more where product product professionals product owners and product managers are just being tasked with just the delivery piece product owners even more so because yeah that’s their you know typically they’re working in the agile team and that’s more of their job is the execution piece

um now I think that it comes down to I’m going to steal Robyn’s probably point around product discovery really understanding the why behind decisions is the strategy so what can you be doing as a product owner to understand what information is out there in your company how do you talk I I know sometimes there’s just never enough time but how do you get out into the market get outside of the building and talk to other people in your market so that you can be really good at understanding the why behind decisions and that really is what informs strategy so that’s what I would say

Robyn Brooks | 1:03:10–1:11:30

yeah I agree you know talk to your product leaders let them know that it’s something you’re interested in you might be able to do a ride along where you listen in quietly to uh customer interviews or a focus group that’s being run um by a member of your team that is focused more on strategy

um and uh I also just want to put out there not everyone who’s focused on the delivery side wants to do strategy it’s okay to specialize too there are career product owners that are very good at their jobs and that’s valuable right but if it is something you’re interested in then you know talk to your leader find ways to contribute and learn and grow your skill sets in that area

Rina Alexin | 1:03:10–1:11:30

great yeah good point Robyn

Closing Remarks

Rina Alexin | 1:11:30–End

all right everyone I hope you learned something about our skills benchmark report um our goal again is to get information out in the market to help you make better decisions about your career uh and I hope today you saw that there’s always something new to work on the product manager job is very hard it’s very varied uh but it’s also we know this it’s also so rewarding

um so there’s always something to work on that’s the exciting part and that’s why we find that a lot of product managers are continuous learners uh and I wish you all just a more successful successful year take our skills assessment if you haven’t yet and plan to actually work on something this year be strategic with your career thanks everyone see you next time

Robyn Brooks | 1:11:30–End

thank you