Overview of the Competencies

Years ago, I met an early PM at Microsoft who helped define what we think of as product management today. She started at Microsoft in the mid-1990s. At the time, the PM role was in its infancy, but its importance was already clear. She told new PMs at Microsoft: “You are like the mortar in a brick wall.” Like mortar, you must fluidly fill the gaps between the bricks to make the whole wall stronger.

This analogy resonates even more today. AI is turning product development from an assembly line — where product defines, design shapes, and engineering builds — into a jazz band. People riff across traditional boundaries, and the lead shifts as the product evolves. As a PM, you must fill more gaps, not fewer: keeping the group aligned, moving the work forward, and helping the strongest ideas land.

Product management has always been a fluid, connective role. AI makes it even more so. What the job demands varies by company, team, and situation — and that situation now includes an expanding set of people taking a more active role in product development.

The answer is not that product management is dead or that the PM role is going away. The aperture is widening on who does the work. This toolkit began as a framework for product managers. Today, its competencies apply to anyone responsible for turning customer needs into valuable products.

As a product manager, you are like the mortar in a brick wall. Like mortar, you must fluidly fill the gaps to make the whole team stronger.

The fluidity of the PM role can make it hard to define the traits you need to succeed. At TripAdvisor, we found that the strongest PMs are intellectual athletes who excel at a diverse, mutually reinforcing set of skills.

We codified those skills into 12 competencies for product builders, organized into four areas critical to driving business impact: Product Execution (your ability to build exceptional products), Customer Insight (your ability to understand and deliver on customer needs), Product Strategy (your ability to drive business impact through product innovation), and Influencing People (your ability to rally people around the team’s work).

© Ravi-Mehta.com

These 12 competencies are as close as I’ve found to a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) definition of product management.

What AI changes

Today, these 12 competencies remain true. AI changes how you do the job, but not the shape of the role. Product Execution, Customer Insight, Product Strategy, and Influencing People remain the pillars of product management — the pillars necessary to build valuable products customers love.

Yet, in each of these areas and across every competency, AI changes the day-to-day. Today, you can define products at much higher fidelity using prototypes, deliver them radically faster, mine unstructured data to paint a vivid picture of the customer, and create human-centered experiences that adapt to how people actually work rather than requiring customers to learn complex interfaces.

At the same time, AI is placing more emphasis on the hardest parts of your job: charting a strategy during the most intense time in the history of tech and leading a team that must deliver under unprecedented pressure.

There’s a lot to master, and there are points of tension in the PM role. It is a role that requires people to be simultaneously empathetic and analytical, qualitative and quantitative, meticulous about detail, and capable of grand abstract thinking. To become a peak PM, you must be both a creative innovator and a rigorous optimizer.

You do not need to do it all

When I released the competencies, my most important point was this:

You do not need to do it all.

Even at your peak, you’ll excel at only a handful of these competencies. What separates an average PM from a peak PM is not mastery of every skill — it’s understanding your strengths and gaps, then building around them.

Great products are built by teams with mutually reinforcing skills. That remains true whether you work alongside dozens of people or build independently: no one does it all alone. Knowing when to seek guidance, perspective, or support is critical — especially now, when AI makes it easy to produce work faster than you can develop the judgment to evaluate it. At its root, AI slop comes from one of two failures: not caring about the result or not knowing enough to see what’s wrong.

You do not need to be a full-stack builder, a jack-of-all-trades, or a solo act. You do not need to be a super IC. The top 1% of builders will lean into their strengths — the superpowers where AI will always lag a step behind. They’ll also know their gaps and unite a team capable of far more than they could achieve alone.

How expectations change with seniority

AI has made it possible for more people to build — and for ICs to have more impact than ever. But just because everyone can build doesn’t mean everyone should spend most of their time building. Nor does it mean the future belongs to the super IC and leaders have less of a role to play. Leadership matters more as teams move faster: a faster car needs steadier steering. Leaders set direction, maintain alignment, and keep the work on course.

If you’re a leader, you have a vital role to play, but you must evolve with the times. These 12 competencies can guide that evolution.

All 12 competencies matter at every level of seniority, but their relative importance — and what excellence looks like — changes as your scope grows. Product Execution is critical early in your career. As you become more senior, Product Strategy and Influencing People become the critical path to growth.

Broadly, you can think about it like this:

• Product managers build products.

• Product leaders build the teams that build the products.

• Product executives build the systems that build the teams that build the products.

You can use this ladder to understand how individual competencies evolve. Take a competency like Product Quality. Some may say that quality assurance is the responsibility of junior PMs and is below the pay grade of a director or VP. Instead, it’s important to understand that quality is not just the concern of IC PMs. Quality is your product’s most important feature, and without it, no amount of strategic thinking will make up for a product that fails a customer when it counts.

As a product manager, you must master the Product Quality competency to deliver high-quality products. As a product leader, you must instill a quality mindset in your team. As a product executive, you must build the scalable systems that allow quality to become a company-wide core competency.

Ship impact, not features

As a peak product builder, you don’t just ship features. You do whatever it takes to deliver valuable outcomes for your users, your team, and your company. You do whatever it takes to deliver business impact.

Let’s dive into each of the 12 competencies and learn how you can become a peak product builder.