—— Knowledge Base ——
Product Mindset Maturity Assessment
Introduction
We leverage Product Mindset Maturity Assessments when a Product Leader is new to the role and wants to better understand the strengths/challenges of themselves or their team, or when the team is not performing well and there is a concern about the mindset of the team being a part of the challenge.
Who Do We Assess?
We work with the key Stakeholder of the project to make a recommendation of who should be included in an assessment. This is usually determined by the challenge to be solved. This has ranged from the CPO and Product Leadership team to all Product Managers in the organization.
Why Do We Need To Do This?
We’re looking for ways to understand (and then improve) the efficiency of the Product organization. This may mean that there are consistent gaps in one trait that can be seen across the majority of the team. There may be areas for improvement that you can share with your team that gives them targeted skills they can “level up”. There may be opportunities in your hiring practices to improve the blend of skills on your team.
Promoting From Within
Often times in larger organizations, Product Managers are people who have been “promoted” into the role as a result of having done well in another position.
(Juan, you’ve been a great BA, so we’ll “promote” you to a Product Manager as a next step. Radwa, you are an expert in Supply Chain and Logistics, we’d like you to to move to the Product team and support the Supply Chain products we are supporting…)
Just because these people were skilled in another role or specific organization of the company does not ensure their success as a Product Manager.
Scoping/Costing
Executing
Here are some of the best practices acquired after doing this for several clients.
Communicating
You’ll want to be sure you help your client communicate about this process— A LOT. People will naturally fear that they are being questioned and that their job can be impacted by their answers. If applicable, make it clear at every interaction that any answers will be provided without attribution to an individual.
Our client Executive Sponsor sent a well-worded email to everyone explaining the goals for the project. Our client Project Coordinator sent the interview requests to interviewees, which also included reminders that the interviews were to support the project and that no attribution would be given to the answers.
Scheduling
If you are coordinating a large group, be sure your client Project Coordinator is primed to do the heavy lifting, or you will waste tons of hours on administrivia. Get your Project Coordinator to gather a list of names, titles and time zones for the interviewees.
If using multiple TCGen interviewers, determine estimated workload. (20% John, 40% Krista, 40% Teresa).
Begin with a small group of “super user” equivalents. These will be people who are excited about the project, fairly tenured in the organization and have an opinion. These will help interviewers start getting an understanding of the organization, acronyms and a view of the challenges.
Add additional interviewees to the mix in groups. (As an example, for one client we did 6 as our starter, then approximately 20 new people every two weeks.) As you want to add in interviewees, assign an interviewer to them based on load balancing—but potentially additionally informed by their role or time zone. Check routinely that the load is balanced appropriately—cancellations and other schedule changes sometime throw original plans off if working with a large pool.
Provide a Calendly (or similar) link for each interviewer, and have your Project Coordinator send only the relevant link.
Plan 45 minutes for an interview. You can combine this with an information gathering interview, with approximately 25 minutes spent on general information gathering, and 20 spent on maturity.
**DO NOT record interviews, as this will impact the quality of the answers you receive. If you use a tool such as Read.AI, be sure to disable for these calls.
Calibrating
If more than one TCGen interviewer is performing maturity assessments, use the first 5-ish interviews to calibrate your maturity rating system. 2 TCGen’s attend the call, independently rank and then share the ratings to see if they align.
Once you are confident that rankings will be consistent across interviewers, move to 1:1 interviews.
Tracking Data
If anything we did could use significant improvement, this might be the place. We did a combined Structured Interview & Maturity in one interview. Our goal was to create detailed notes that could be referred back to if needed many weeks or months later. Plus, a way to summarize so we could quickly identify trends without opening tons of documents.
We opted for each keeping a detailed document per interviewee and a summary spreadsheet with both the Structured Interview and Maturity Assessment. Both sets of documents ended up being used extensively, so if you find a better solution to this, I would advise that solution have both detailed and summarized levels of notes.
Questions & Scoring
This sample is for an interview pool of all Product Managers and their managers. Be sure to adjust the questions appropriately if you have a blend of roles.
Exemplars
If this project has become a part of the engagement, it is likely because there is a known problem or concern with the maturity of the organization. While you are going through these interviews, keep track of any individual who does an exceptional job in any one of the 5 traits. As a part of the final client recommendations, you may choose to leverage these individuals as a part of educating the broader team.
Analysis
We leveraged a radar diagram to look for commonality across the organization, teams, and job functions.
When a significant (or consistent) training gap exists, it can be useful to work with the client’s HR organization to provide assistance with how to provide learning tools, personal development goals, and improve hiring.
What Traits Are We Looking For?
This image depicts the 5 Traits that make up a successful Product Manager.
What Do We Ask?
While questions will vary based on what roles are being surveyed, the following is an idea of what might be asked to an individual contributor Product Manager role:
Product Mindset Maturity:
- How do you determine what your product’s roadmap will be?
- Tell me about how you determine the value of your project (business & financial) and how you share that with stakeholders.
- What do you do when you get an estimate that does not align with your timeline?
- How do you assess changes in the marketplace? How do changes mid-stream make you feel?
- How do you support your teammates or co-workers?
- Is there anything else you would like to tell me?
What Do You Do Once You’ve Completed the Assessment?
Once we have spoken with all of the relevant team members, we analyze the data and look for trends. This trend across the team will help us understand how training, hiring practices, and/or leveraging the high performers on your team can help bring you closer to your ideal team. We use the data we’ve learned from the engagement to create small, step-wise improvements to the team’s caliber.
Learn more about Leverage Assessment to Up-Level PM Team on our YouTube Channel