CHECKLIST
Product manager promotion readiness checklist
Five groups, each grounded in a real evaluation dimension. For every item, the useful test isn’t whether you can recall an example — it’s whether you could answer a specific follow-up question about it without hesitating.
Strategy & prioritization
- Name one roadmap decision where you rejected the more obvious option — and explain why in two sentences.
- Describe a tradeoff you made that a stakeholder disagreed with at the time.
Execution & judgment
- Point to a specific commitment you delivered against, including what nearly made you miss it.
- Describe a plan you changed mid-flight because new data contradicted your own assumption — without being told to.
Leadership & influence
- Describe a specific disagreement with a peer, or an engineering or design lead, that you resolved through your own reasoning rather than your title.
- Describe one real, specific moment of unblocking or coaching someone — not a general mentoring relationship.
Commercial & customer judgment
- Tie one decision you made to a specific revenue, retention, or cost outcome, with real numbers.
- Describe a time you pushed back on a request from a large customer or an executive, and why.
Scope & organizational impact
- Check whether your strongest examples span more than one team, or are all bounded to a single product area.
The honest limit of a checklist
Checking every box above is a good sign. It is not the same as proof — a checklist can’t ask a follow-up question, and it can’t tell the difference between an example that is genuinely specific and one that only sounds that way on a first pass. That distinction is exactly what an adaptive interview is built to probe, and it is what a completed report states plainly: what is already proven, what is not yet proven, and what evidence would close the gap.
A checklist tells you where to look. It can't tell you what it finds.
You know whether you can answer these. You don't know whether your answer would hold up to a real follow-up question — that's what the adaptive interview actually tests.