An open-source, collaborative tool for growing product managers

The Product Management Competency Framework

At Organa, we've spent a lot of time coaching and supporting the growth of Product Owners and Product Managers at many different organisations.

To help us serve our aspiring Product Managers, Sandy and I designed a competency assessment framework. It’s a simple printable PDF that enables a Product Manager to self assess their capabilities, along with getting input from their peers and their manager (or their stakeholders) to help shape a growth plan.

What makes it unique?

• We believe that the best growth plans come from the intersection of your interests and the needs of the business
• Leadership and self-awareness are crucial, often-missed aspects of Product Management
• Printable and practical
• Open-source - help us create a better framework, or fork it to suit your needs
• Includes a peer-assessment component to enable product teams to grow together.

We've been testing this tool out on our clients and iterating on it over time and we're now excited to announce that we're giving it away for free, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Download the Printable PDF:
PM Competency Framework v1-3.pdf

“We had looked at other frameworks and also tried to create our own but this was the simplest, clearest and easiest to use” - Abigail Thomas, Head of Product Strategy, SBS Australia

It’s designed for Product Managers (not Product Owners) so it has a solid bias towards the more strategic activities over the tactical operational activities that PO’s typically get involved with.

The usefulness of the assessment is the conversation you can have once you identify areas for growth and any subsequent growth plan you come up with as a result of these conversations.

We want to help organisations and businesses grow great products for their customers and we love helping grow great Product Managers. This tool is yours to use, yours to remix, yours to do whatever you want with. We’ve assigned a Creative Commons license to it that allows anyone, commercial or non-profit, to use it, even remix/transform/improve upon it. The only thing we ask for under this license is you follow the rules of the license.

If you'd like to give us your feedback, make a copy of it to modify for your own purposes or suggest changes, you can access the Google Slides:

[Open Source] Google Slides:
PM Competency Framework v1-3 FINAL

Enjoy! We'd love to hear your feedback on it, so feel free to comment on the Google Slide link above, or find us on LinkedIn, through our website or email.

Sandy, Brendan and Sarah