For a quick post today I thought I’d share a personal checklist for assessing product management / product owner candidates. These 24 items are useful when 1) thinking about the role you hope to fill, and 2) assessing a candidate. It can take a lifetime of shipping to max out your chops, so it is important to view all of these skills on a continuum.

See PDF here1. Curiosity, asks “why” 2. Entrepreneurial spirit 3. Respect and empathy for crafters, and builders 4. Respect and empathy non-builders (aka “business”) 5. Systems thinking 6. Behavioral economics / cognitive biases, consumer psychology 7. Facilitation techniques (meetings, activities) 8. Qualitative research methods 9. Data analysis, statistics, descriptive/predictive/prescriptive analytics (and requisite technical skills) 10. Experiment design 11. Prior domain experience (shipping products in similar domain) 12. Sufficient technical experience for domain 13. Modern software development practices 14. Initiative kickoff techniques 15. KPI selection and frameworks 16. Presentation and public speaking 17. Team communication (software developers, UX, QA, etc.) 18. Non-team communication (executive team, other departments, etc.) 19. Decision making / prioritization techniques 20. Brainstorming, user story-generation, story-mapping, story-slicing techniques 21. Financial forecasting 22. Business model generation, pricing, model analysis, and validation 23. Competitive and market analysis 24. Product lifecycle management, go-to-market