Successful careers in product roles require skills across three areas: 

1. Product Craft & Strategy:  From ambiguous problems to great products
2. Process Execution:  Get stuff done successfully
3. Leadership:  Lead/support initiatives, teams, products, portfolio

Each area has skills that are necessary for a product team member: PM, designer, analyst, ops, PMM, and other product-adjacent roles. The depth in a given skill is expected to be higher for more experienced roles. 

To understand the skill in a more detailed way, consider asking questions. For example, ask, “Do they plan for, measure, and track customer outcomes and business outcomes?” for the Outcomes orientation skill.  

Get the full list of questions to consider in the Product Team Skills template. Here are a few more examples: 

• Do they forecast release dates and release on forecasted dates?
• Are they aware of how the business makes money and what are its strategic advantages (moats) and disadvantages? 
• Do they seek, generate, and apply insights from customers by segment, competitive intelligence, and market trends? 
• Have they made hard prioritization or trade-off decisions using a criteria framework and scoped each milestone? 
• Do they play with other products in the same or other markets to learn new ideas? Do they keep learning about new technology?
• Are they creative in finding effective validation techniques that are inexpensive and fast? 
• Do they care deeply about the product? Are they viewed as the goto person for the product area?
• Are they able to influence and inspire their team, other teams, cross team, and exec/leadership team?

PS: Check out more articles on building products. I write to pay it forward and to clarify my thinking.