Petra Wille: recommendation

Transcript context

…Going back to knowing what is a competent PM at a company. Something I want to ... I'll make sure to include in the show notes for this is I actually did all this research on the career ladders at all of the biggest tech companies. So I have the spreadsheet that it's public of just the skills that every company evaluates your PMs by, but most companies don't have. They're not great. So say your company doesn't have a career ladder competency framework leveling thing, what do you suggest folks do to help figure out what is a competent PM here at our company? I'd say use one of the assessments that are already out there. Maybe we can include this as well. I wrote a blog post where I put all the ones that I'm aware of into, so there's the PM Daisy and, obviously, Marty Cagan has an assessment, and I created a framework called the PMwheel and there are a few others in there. Go find one that is close to what you actually think a good PM should look like and then customize it. Don't use it just by copy paste because sometimes you have just rather technical PMs in your organization and then all these assessment points about user interviews and discovery are maybe not that applicable in your situation, right? So use one template that is close what you want to achieve, heavy customize it because it is really a great inspiration to see, "Oh, these are all the things that other people think a PM should be doing." Or maybe you could merge one or two of those and tailor it to your needs. So that will be my first suggestion. Plus, reflecting on the personality traits because I think there are some things that you better hire for and that are super hard to develop in a corporate environment. So for me, that, for example, is curiosity. I think product people need to be curious about the world, how it works, about things, no matter the topic. The best product people that I know, whatever the topic is, they're interested and tell me more about it. So that is, for example, there's something I would always check when hiring product people because I know it's hard to build that muscle or empathy, definitely something that I want to hire for. I know that I can help them develop this muscle a bit more and stepping into shoes of users, and stakeholders, and colleagues easier. But still, if there is, yeah, not a decent level of empathy built into this person, then it's nearly impossible for me as a product lead to help them get towards a seasoned level. So that's another important thing. Think about personality traits and think about skills and know-how and to think about skills and know-how. Use some of the already established assessments. So we will try to link to as many of those that you mentioned in the show notes. Maybe talk about the PMwheel, which is the framework that you suggest for folks to understand, just like what are all the skills that a PM needs to have.…

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