How to Use This Toolkit

The Product Competency Toolkit helps anyone building products develop the skills to create more value for customers and their company. Use the 12 competencies to understand your strengths, identify where to grow, and put that learning to work.

I published the Product Competency Toolkit in April 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 lockdown. Since then, thousands of PMs and product leaders have used the 12 competencies to reflect on their work and help their teams level up.

At the time, I couldn’t have imagined the impact the toolkit would have on me or the people who used it. A few months later, I connected with my longtime friend Brian Balfour and became an EIR at Reforge. Over the next six years, Reforge became a central part of a goal I had set for myself: to help people and companies deal with the challenges ahead.

I didn’t know those challenges would include a radical change in how we build products — one so profound that some folks believe the product job itself is disappearing. It’s easy to see why that fear has taken hold. Companies are downsizing, much as they did in the early days of COVID-19, and increasingly shifting dollars from talent to tokens.

I see a very different future. I don’t think the product job goes away. I believe it becomes more important than ever. Technology has democratized creation, starting with text, images, and video. Now, for the first time, anyone can build software. Today, the most watched director in the world is MrBeast, not Steven Spielberg. Tomorrow, some of the most successful products will be created by people who would have been shut out in the past.

More people than ever will create products. And that means one of the most in-demand skills in the AI era will be product thinking — the type of thinking that has long been at the center of product management.

So, in this new world:

Product management is not optional.

By product management, I don’t mean a particular title, role, or organizational structure. I mean the discipline of understanding customers, building excellent products, creating business value, and leading people toward a shared outcome.

That discipline — and the product thinking behind it — is essential for anyone who hopes to succeed at the demanding but rewarding task of creating products people love. That includes everyone who creates products today — PMs, product leaders, engineers, designers, UX researchers, data analysts — and a new cohort of people who are creating for the first time.

Whether you’ve spent your career building products or are creating one for the first time, these 12 competencies — updated for the AI era — can help:

• If you are a PM, use the competencies to understand how the job is changing, what remains the same, and which capabilities you need to strengthen.

• If you are a product leader, use them to reassess your team, redefine expectations, and put the right combination of people against your new priorities.

• If you are an engineer, designer, researcher, analyst, or other product builder, use them to identify the strengths you already bring and the product skills you need to take a more active role.

• If you are building your first product, use them to understand the full discipline: defining, building, and launching excellent products; serving customers deeply; creating durable business value; and leading people toward a shared outcome.

If you’re navigating this shift, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at ravi@ravi-mehta.com.

The product job is changing. The work of building products people love has never mattered more.