Many organizations invest in product management training and leadership development, yet still struggle with inconsistent decisions, weak execution, and stalled growth. The issue is often not talent. It’s the organizational system surrounding product management.

The Product Management Organizational Practices Assessment evaluates whether your organization’s structures, governance, decision rights, and leadership mechanisms enable product management to function as a business discipline, not just a role. This assessment does not evaluate individual product manager skills or competency. Those are measured separately through Sequent’s Product Management Competency Assessment.

This assessment focuses on the organizational conditions required to support growth capability: the systems, practices, and leadership behaviors that enable or constrain execution.

Why Product Management Breaks Down at Scale

As organizations grow, or after successive reorganizations, the “function” of product management often becomes fragmented:

• Roles exist, but authority is unclear
• Decisions are made, but inconsistently
• Strategy exists, but does not translate into execution
• Accountability exists, but empowerment does not

Even highly capable product managers struggle when:

• Decision rights are ambiguous
• Governance varies by function or leader
• Data and performance metrics are inaccessible
• Portfolio priorities shift without discipline
• Leadership expectations are misaligned

Training alone cannot fix these problems. They are organizational practice issues.

What We Mean by Organizational Practices

Organizational practices are the structures, systems, processes, decision rights, and leadership behaviors that shape how product management operates day to day.

They determine:

• How product decisions are made and escalated
• How work is prioritized and funded
• How product performance is measured
• How product managers are supported and managed
• How consistently product thinking is applied across the enterprise

This assessment evaluates those practices directly, at the organizational level.

What the Organizational Practices Assessment Evaluates

The Product Management Organizational Practices Assessment examines six core practice clusters that collectively determine whether product management can operate effectively and predictably across the organization:

1. Data Availability and Management
   Access to customer, market, financial, and competitive data required for insight and decision-making.
2. Process, Template, and Tool Management
   Ownership, consistency, and adoption of product management processes, tools, and artifacts.
3. Performance and Metrics Management
   Use of meaningful KPIs, financial metrics, and performance feedback to guide decisions.
4. Management of Product Managers
   How product managers are recruited, developed, coached, evaluated, and progressed.
5. Organizational Alignment and Governance
   Leadership alignment, decision rights, escalation paths, and governance forums that reduce or create organizational drag.
6. Product Portfolio Management
   How products are evaluated, prioritized, funded, and rationalized across the life cycle.

Together, these practices form the organizational infrastructure that enables, or constrains, product management performance.

The Dual-Rating Model: Performance vs. Importance

Unlike maturity models that imply a fixed progression, this assessment uses a dual-rating approach designed for executive decision-making.

For each organizational practice, leaders assess:

• Current Performance – How effectively (or consistently) the practice operates today
• Importance – How critical the practice is to achieving business objectives

The gap between performance and importance reveals where leadership attention matters most.

This allows leaders to:

• Distinguish critical constraints from background noise
• Avoid trying to “fix everything at once”
• Focus improvement efforts where they will produce measurable impact

This approach supports prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoff decisions, not abstract scoring.

Not a Maturity Model, A Leadership Diagnostic

Maturity models assume:

• All practices matter equally
• Progress should be linear and comprehensive
• Organizations should aim for the same end state

The Organizational Practices Assessment is different.

It recognizes that:

• Importance varies by strategy, timing, and context
• Leadership capacity is finite
• Some issues must be addressed now, while others can wait

This is a decision-support diagnostic, not a compliance checklist.

Leadership Participation and Facilitated Alignment

Organizational practices do not change because a report is delivered.
They change when leaders align on what matters most and commit to action.

For this reason, Sequent often recommends that:

• Product leaders and selected C-suite executives complete the assessment
• The results are used as input to a facilitated Leading and Implementing Product Management workshop

This creates a shared, evidence-based foundation for leadership dialogue.

Assessment results are often followed by the Leading and Implementing Product Management workshop, where leaders interpret findings together and prioritize a small number of high-impact, 90-day improvement initiatives. This facilitated process helps leadership teams align on what matters most, decide what to address now versus later, and translate insight into focused action.

The Role of the Leading and Implementing Product Management Workshop

The workshop is not training in the traditional sense. It is a leadership working session.

Using assessment results, leaders:

• Interpret what the assessment is revealing about the organization
• Discuss differences in perception across functions
• Clarify what is most important now — and what must be deprioritized
• Align on the purpose, scope, and expectations of product management
• Define governance, decision rights, and leadership support
• Establish realistic improvement horizons

This is where product management shifts from a role to a deliberately designed organizational capability.

From Insight to Action: Short-Cycle Capability Projects

Assessment findings are often translated into short-cycle capability projects focused on high-importance gaps.

These projects:

• Target one or two critical practices at a time
• Run in 60–90-day cycles
• Address root causes such as governance, metrics, or decision rights
• Deliver visible improvement without large-scale disruption

This approach replaces broad, year-long transformations with disciplined, high-impact progress.

How Organizations Use This Assessment

Organizations use the Organizational Practices Assessment to:

• Understand why product performance varies across teams or portfolios
• Identify systemic barriers to execution
• Align leadership on current-state reality
• Decide what can realistically be improved within given time horizons
• Inform operating model and portfolio decisions

It often explains why:

• Strategy stalls after approval
• Product managers defer decisions upward
• Cross-functional friction persists
• Portfolio decisions feel reactive or political

How This Complements Competency Assessments

• Competency Assessments answer:
  Do our people have the skills and experience to do the work?
• Organizational Practices Assessment answers:
  Have we designed the organization to support that work — and where should we intervene first?

Used together, they allow leaders to distinguish skill gaps from system constraints and prioritize intervention with confidence.

What You Receive

Assessment engagements deliver:

• Performance-versus-importance profiles across practice areas
• Clear visibility into priority gaps
• Leadership-ready insights for sequencing change
• Input to facilitated alignment workshops
• A baseline for measuring organizational improvement over time

Findings are synthesized into actionable leadership insight, not raw survey data.

Ready to Clarify What to Fix, and When?

Ready to Clarify What to Fix, and When? If product management is central to your growth strategy, it deserves intentional design and disciplined leadership alignment

Frequently Asked Questions