Are You Strategic? Take Our Product Management Quiz

Classically, Product Management is a strategic business role. Increasingly, we product managers spend our time with tactical execution. The goal remains to be as strategic as our condition allows. How strategic are you today? Take our quiz below to find out.

Give yourself a rating – from 1 to 4, on the following, with 1 being “I don’t do this;” to 4 being “this is part of my regular routine.” At the end, add the totals to help identify your level of “strategic-ness.”

The Strategic Product Management Quiz

1. I routinely perform market research including market interviews, surveys, and 3^rd party analysis
2. I regularly have constructive, contextual conversations with executive leadership about my product(s)
3. I define, measure and regularly report on my product’s goals and metrics
4. I manage the product backlog at the goal level – I always group product requirements in a meaningful way
5. I bring market-based data to development meetings which will improve priority setting
6. I regularly communicate to all internal stakeholders with market- and value-based data
7. I focus on the impact of product plan changes rather than the technical details of the changes
8. I can crisply explain the customer problems that my product(s) (will) solve
9. I am the expert on competitive alternative(s) to my product and share this with my stakeholders
10. I respect my technical team’s talents and avoid debating low level technical decisions
11. The Product Roadmap(s) are up to date and all key stakeholders understand the direction
12. When significant plan changes occur, I own communicating the impacts to others
13. I manage and own the trade-offs when customer-specific requests (e.g. deals) change the Product Roadmap
14. The organization understands my role and values my contributions on the team(s)
15. I will usually give credit to the team rather than take personal credit for successes
16. There is easily accessible product strategy documentation about my product(s) that is available to my stakeholders (Roadmaps, Positioning, Business Cases, etc.)

Your Strategic Product Management Quiz Results

Add them up, rank them, look for the biggest gaps for improvement. Proactively share the results with your manager and team.

49-64: Congratulations! You are effectively managing your product in a strategic way. Look to the areas that you scored lower and consider ways to continue to improve.

33-48: Keep at it! You have lots of areas to improve but are heading in the right direction. The stage of your company or team (startup, growth, understaffed, etc.) may be causing some of the gaps, so recognizing your gaps is the first step to improving.

17-32: Are you a technical Product Owner or Product Manager? If there are others that are filling in the gaps, then your team may be extremely strategic. But if not, this is time to have a discussion with your management about ways and benefits of making strategic changes.

1-16: You are not strategically managing your product – it is managing you. Realize that in some organizations, this is the role that they want you to play. But, you need to decide if this is what you want in your role and career. Put together a proactive, step-wise plan to enrich your role in the organization.

Feel free to share your results and feedback with me at jmilburn@practicalgrowthstrategies.com so we can discuss some next steps. Also, check out ProductStart at www.productstart.io for tools to help you become a Strategic Product Manager – a 30 day Free Evaluation license is now available.