In 2012, Tripadvisor launched a Product Rotation program for new MBA graduates. At the time, Tripadvisor was one of very few consumer tech companies in the Boston area, and the company needed to significantly grow its product management team. The PMs hired into Tripadvisor’s Product Rotation program often came into the company with little or no prior product experience. They learned on the job over a course of two years.

We needed to understand how these new hires were tracking against the requirements necessary to excel as product managers. Over time, we developed the Tripadvisor Product Competencies to provide comprehensive rubric to help with hiring and developing stellar PMs.

We decided not to include leadership principles that could apply to all employees, and really focus on what are the competencies that we think are specific to product managers and product leaders. We could use those other things alongside the product competency matrix, but the product competency matrix was designed to be really opinionated around what it means to be a great product builder.

We rolled this out to managers first and worked with them to understand what we were trying to accomplish with the competency matrix, and get their feedback. Then we made some adjustments to some of the expectations based on that feedback. And then once managers were on board, then we rolled it out to the rest of the organization.

As we started socializing it, the first question people asked was: What exactly does this brightly colored box mean? So the second pass was actually doing the detailed expectations on a per level basis.

The biggest headwind in terms of rolling this out was people feeling like the goal posts had shifted on them. They were operating under a certain set of expectations of what it would take to get to the next level, and then all of a sudden there's this new system and it seems like the next level in their career has just gotten further away.

I think it's really important as part of rolling something like this out to talk about the fact that this is a tool. It's designed to help create better conversations between you and your manager, set expectations more clearly, and is meant to be applied with an eye towards the contributions that that a person has made.

Ravi Mehta

We created this one-page overview of product management competencies make it easy to someone to quickly understand: What skills do PMs need to master and how do those skills evolve as a person gets more senior?

Product Competencies “At a Glance” at Tripadvisor

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