What is a product management maturity model?

Strategy block. Session 1.

In this article, I will be talking about product management at a higher level. Something that won’t be in your short-term agenda (except in some specific cases), but something every aspiring product organisation will aim to achieve in the long run. That’s the maturity of the product development processes.

Most of you will be familiar with the bottom and top scenarios. The first one is common within early-stage start-ups where there is no formal environment for managing products or an actual product management team and the processes are intuition driven. It’s called instinct-driven. Then the other one is where every product organisation would like to be. It is when the organisation consistently delivers high-quality and successful products, can predict trends in the product processes and every function is focused on continuous improvement. It’s called strategy-driven.

The question is how many stages are there before the company gets from the bottom to the top? I have come across various sources, some have four, some six. But the most common one has five, the one I will refer to here from Gartner is 5 steps model.

Peter Drucker, one of the most widely-known and influential thinkers on management, once said:

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure”

As you can imagine, many metrics are associated with tracking the status of product development maturity. Below I will cover on a high…