PRODUCT MANAGEMENT KNOWLEDGE BASE: PEOPLE CAPABILITIES

Don’t Fail Before You Begin

Twitter co-founder and angel investor of Square, Pinterest, and Nest, Biz Stone, said, “When you hand people possibility, they do great things.” This perfectly captures the essence that great people (aka product managers) make great software products. While technology and processes are critical, it’s product managers who leverage these resources to drive innovation and success.

Yet, in many organisations, we lack the right capabilities to create great products.

The McKinsey State of Organisations (2023) reports;

Organisations are highly ambitious in their digital strategies but lack the right capabilities to execute. They argue that organisations must build institutional capabilities to plug the strategic and capability divide to achieve a competitive advantage.

Without the right capabilities, especially in terms of people, an organisation will struggle to adapt to market changes and compete effectively against those who invest in the talent and resources necessary to stay ahead and execute their strategy successfully.

Sadly, only 5% of McKinsey’s State of Organisations (2023) survey respondents reported feeling prepared to address their capability gaps.

This means that 95% of organisations have severely limited their chances of executing their strategy effectively—they’ve failed before they’ve even begun.

Arresting the Problem

If talent and capabilities are essential for success, why don’t we invest more time in identifying the capabilities we need and planning strategically to acquire the right product managers? Addressing this gap requires a deliberate approach to understanding which specific skills will drive growth and then taking proactive steps to build or source them.

This starts with a thorough capability assessment, which can be conducted through activities such as:

• Internal interviews and audits: Gathering insights from leadership and team members on current skill sets and future needs.
• Employee feedback: Understanding where team members feel proficient and where they see room for improvement.
• Structured capability assessments: Using formal assessment tools to evaluate both technical and adaptive capabilities across the team.

By systematically gathering this information, organisations can pinpoint their skills, identify gaps, and create a tailored development or hiring plan to close those gaps effectively.

What Are Product Capabilities

At Brainmates, we refer to these essential competencies as “Product Capabilities,” a concept similar to what Smallwood and Ulrich term more broadly “Organisational Capabilities”.

They describe Organisational Capabilities as;

“Key intangible assets. You can’t see or touch them, yet they can make all the difference in the world when it comes to market value. These capabilities—the collective skills, abilities, and expertise of an organisation.”

Brainmates refers to them as Product Capabilities because, in today’s world, every modern organisation is essentially in the business of building software. This idea, first popularised by Marc Andreessen’s 2011 statement, “Software is eating the world,” continues to shape industries beyond Tech. Satya Nadella echoed this sentiment: “A car is now a computer. Software skills are a valuable resource… In ten years, we won’t have the tech industry and other industries—computing will be a core part of every business.”

For Brainmates, Product Capabilities are the core competencies required to develop valuable software products. At the heart of these competencies are people capabilities—skills and behaviours, both technical and adaptive. Technical skills are often more straightforward to teach and relate to specific tasks or expertise, such as strategy development or product design. In contrast, adaptive skills, which are harder to cultivate, shape how individuals navigate challenges, collaborate, and lead. These include behaviours like influencing stakeholders, decision-making in uncertainty, and effective communication—critical for success in a dynamic environment.

Technical and adaptive capabilities are required to:

1. Navigate ambiguous markets and situations,
2. Identify opportunities that resonate with the market,
3. Engage and align stakeholders on new opportunities and,
4. Ultimately, evolve opportunities into products that sustain long-term organisational growth.

These examples of insufficient capabilities—whether mistaking a product release for a launch, failing to differentiate the value proposition, or ignoring customer research—are not just minor missteps; they are critical gaps that often lead to product failure. When teams lack the right Product Capabilities, the consequences are severe.

Why Product Capability REALLY Matters

Product failure isn’t just about a missed opportunity; it’s a financially expensive and emotionally draining setback. Without sufficient capabilities, new products are far more likely to fail, leaving behind wasted investment, lost market opportunities, and the demoralisation of teams who worked hard on a project that didn’t succeed.

And, the high failure rate of new products (software and non-software) is a well-documented challenge, with institutions like MIT and Harvard Business School touting that approximately 50% to 90% of new products fail. MIT notes that this sobering statistic impacts businesses across the board, including industry giants like Google, Coca-Cola, and Colgate. For example, Google Glass, despite significant investment, quickly disappeared from the market. Similarly, New Coke, introduced in 1985 with a switch from regular sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, failed to resonate with consumers and was swiftly discontinued.

On closer inspection, however, while the failure rate may not always reach 90%, it still hovers around 40%—a considerable figure.

Now imagine that 40% of your product and engineering efforts are wasted every year. If your company invests $10 million in new product development, $4 million could be lost due to capability gaps. How do we communicate this to our executives? Where should this problem be reflected to drive home the urgency of addressing capability gaps?

Don’t Let Your Products Fail

Don’t allow your products to fail; instead, invest in the appropriate capabilities.

As an example, one critical reason for the low success rate of new software products often stems from our tendency to become enamoured with new solutions. In our rush to bring these ideas to market, we often skip critical customer and product discovery processes, neglecting to thoroughly assess their viability and market fit. This is surprising, given the wealth of instructional material and training available on how to conduct proper discovery.

We hypothesise that while this technical capability has improved—teams now know how to perform discovery—the real issue lies in a lack of commercial mindset, an adaptive capability. Many fail to recognise that customer and product discovery isn’t just a box to check; it’s essential to reducing risk and ensuring product success. Supporting this hypothesis, research shows that some companies excel at product discovery but fail to connect these insights to broader commercial outcomes? (Product Talk)?(Cell and Gene).

Discovery without a commercial focus can result in great solutions that don’t translate into business success. Balancing customer insights with strategic, outcome-driven decision-making is essential for organisations to close this gap.

Position Your Product Management Team For Success

To position your organisation within the 60% product success rate, Brainmates emphasises the importance of FIRST having a solid Product Capability Framework. A capability framework helps you identify and strategically select the technical and adaptive product capabilities needed to achieve your organisation’s future ambitions.

Many existing Product Capability frameworks can empower your teams—you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. What’s crucial, however, is deliberately assessing which specific capabilities are essential to driving your business forward. By strategically selecting and aligning these core capabilities with your product portfolio, you ensure your teams are equipped to create valuable products.

You might even consider identifying and managing your team’s capabilities like you do a product portfolio.

Mind The Gaps And Overlaps

• Capability Gaps

Once you’ve determined the required capabilities, the next step is to assess your current product team’s strengths and identify any gaps. Closing these gaps is essential, and there are several ways to do this:

1. Invest in product management training and development to upskill your existing team; lifting their proficiency levels
2. Reskill product team members to take on new, specialised roles and responsibilities
3. Acquire new capabilities through immediate external hires or partnerships
4. Revise your hiring approach to focus on acquiring candidates in the long term with specific capabilities
5. Leverage external consultants to provide expertise and address capability gaps quickly

• Capability Overlaps

In addition to capability gaps, you may also encounter overlapping capabilities across different roles within your team. This overlap can lead to workplace conflict, as team members might rely on the same skill sets without clear direction on who is responsible for specific tasks. To effectively manage these overlaps:

• Understand the nature of the overlaps: Determine which capabilities are being duplicated and why.
• Plan for overlaps strategically: Decide whether overlapping skills can complement each other or need differentiation.
• Clearly define role responsibilities: Provide specific guidance on who is accountable for key tasks to avoid ambiguity and reduce conflict.

Applying a Product Capability Framework That Works for Your Business

• Role Profiles

You can use a Product Capability Framework to identify and design the product management roles your organisation needs now and in the future. Each role should specify the required proficiency level for each core capability. This will ensure that the individual is equipped to succeed within your organisation. Working from this foundation, you can craft more accurate job or position descriptions and job ads tailored to your unique needs.

• Job Descriptions

Taking this methodical approach greatly increases your chances of finding the right talent with the capabilities your team requires. Avoid the common mistake of copying product manager position descriptions from the Internet—those reflect another organisation’s needs and capabilities, which may not align with your strategy.

• Coaching Conversations

Having a Product Capability Framework and clear role profiles provides a solid foundation for continuously assessing your team’s performance. Team members will understand exactly what is expected of them and the performance level they need to achieve. Leaders can quickly identify gaps, enabling more targeted support. Additionally, this framework facilitates better coaching conversations, allowing leaders and individual contributors to engage in more objective, constructive discussions.

• Career Pathways

Once the appropriate capabilities are established, retaining top talent within the organisation is essential. A Product Capability Framework is crucial in outlining vertical and lateral Career Pathways, illustrating the progression opportunities available for individuals in their respective careers. By aligning Career Pathways with product capabilities, team members are not limited by job titles when transitioning to different organisational roles. Instead, they progress based on their existing capabilities and have the opportunity to enhance their skills to fill any capability gaps.

The Brainmates Product Capability Assessment

With over 20 years of consulting experience in product capability assessment and development, Brainmates offers a tailored approach to each client. While there’s no need for your organisation to reinvent the wheel with a new Product Capability Framework, our process is customised to suit your specific needs. We begin by conducting internal interviews to understand your company’s goals, product strategies, and ambitions. We are also aware that certain leaders have particular operating models in mind, and this is duly considered in our Consultation Plan. For instance, some do not prefer working with SAFe.

Through these insights, we identify team challenges and craft a Consultation Plan that addresses those challenges and aligns with your strategic objectives. This plan, including the core capabilities needed to achieve your goals, is shared with key stakeholders for review.

A crucial next step is conducting an Individual Capability Assessment for each team member. This assessment, distributed digitally, ensures that team members receive a personalised report immediately upon completing the online questionnaire. By aggregating and analysing the data from these reports, we identify the capability gaps and overlaps within your team. Not all gaps require immediate attention—only those critical to advancing your goals and strategy need to be addressed. More importantly, the initial assessment of the team’s capabilities serves as a baseline, allowing for continuous re-assessment after each training program to measure progress and growth.

We then develop a Talent Blueprint, which outlines the assessment results and offers actionable insights and tailored recommendations to bridge identified gaps and manage overlaps over 12 months. This ensures that your investment in learning and development as well as hiring is guided by real data, leading to measurable returns and a more strategically aligned workforce.

Your team members can sequentially complete suitable training and coaching individually or collectively to address any skill gaps. We will choose learning modules from both our foundational and our advanced programs. The educational content can be customised to meet your specific requirements. Furthermore, we may propose adjustments to roles and responsibilities in accordance with the identified overlaps. This will improve the product ways of working to enable teams to deliver valuable products more effectively.

You are never alone! We provide continuous support and advisory services throughout the 12-month period, collaborating with you to implement and adjust the Blueprint according to the evolving needs of your organisation and the market.

Don’t Leave Your Success to Chance

Product Capabilities are the lifeblood of any successful organisation. Building the right blend of technical and adaptive skills is no longer optional—it’s essential for navigating market complexities, driving innovation, and maintaining a competitive edge. Without these core capabilities, the risk of failure is not just possible, but probable.

Don’t let your team fall behind. By investing in a Product Capability Assessment, you can identify your strengths, pinpoint gaps, and take strategic action to upskill your team. This investment not only prevents costly product failures but also sets your organisation up for sustainable growth and long-term success.

Take the first step toward building a high-performing product team. Contact Brainmates today to schedule a Product Capability Assessment. Let us help you unlock the full potential of your team, close capability gaps, and ensure that your products succeed in today’s competitive market.