Product Org Fitness Test

Command and control, without the why.

Leaders define who does what by when, without sharing the reasoning or context behind those decisions.

Personal agendas and politics.

Leaders pursue their own hidden agendas and use politics to push them through.

Top management decides both the what and the how.

Leaders make the decisions and rarely consult the teams doing the work; teams execute predefined plans.

No dedicated product voice at the top.

The executive team has no experienced product professional and spreads product responsibility across stakeholders or an inexperienced executive.

A support area serving other departments.

Product is treated as a service function for other departments and has no seat in strategic decisions.

Blurred roles and confusion.

Tech and product roles are poorly defined; people are unclear on who is responsible for what, and why.

Too many layers, built around people.

The org chart is built around individuals or stacks up management layers, slowing decisions with needless complexity.

Functional silos with heavy interdependencies.

Teams depend heavily on one another and most initiatives span several of them, so end-to-end ownership is rarely possible.

Contract-like handovers of requirements.

Other departments treat product teams as service providers, handing over requirements and shifting responsibility as if by contract.

Priorities imposed from outside the team.

Teams follow predefined roadmaps and can't set their own priorities; that happens entirely outside the team.

Reliant on people outside the team.

Teams can't deliver their commitments without outside support, such as Design, QA, or Analytics.

Whatever the next project happens to need.

Teams move to different parts of the customer journey each project, wherever capacity seems to be needed.

Output: features and deadlines.

Teams are measured by how many features they ship and by hitting deadlines; the business impact is barely measured.

Metrics unclear or unmanaged.

Metrics are barely used or vaguely defined, or plentiful but never questioned or improved over time.

Straight to building features.

Teams build features without being explicit about which problems they actually solve.

Focused on internal efficiency.

Most teams work to make internal processes efficient and overlook the customer experience.

Little to no contact with real users.

Teams seldomly talk to real end-users to build an understanding of the problem or designing solutions. Only when clients escalate does the team talk to real end-users.

Data ignored and uncollected.

Teams ignore data and make no effort to collect or improve their datapoints.

Fixed roadmaps, reviewed only on a schedule.

Teams follow strict roadmaps reviewed only at set intervals; leaders expect the plan to be executed as written.

Ship once, never revisit.

Once a feature ships it is never reviewed for whether it still adds value or just distracts users.

P&L is out of sight.

Teams either don't grasp what P&L means or can't relate their work to it.

Seek evidence that confirms their opinions.

Teams often start with an opinion and hunt for evidence that supports their assumptions, rather than tests that could prove them wrong.

Validated only with stakeholders.

Teams collect no end-user feedback and validate releases only with business stakeholders.

Kept alive until the plan says otherwise.

Teams don't drop initiatives proactively; they only stop when another department shifts priorities.

Goals without a path.

The organization may have goals but lacks a sound strategy that shows how to reach them.

Everything is important and urgent.

Prioritization is confusing; many initiatives all share the same label of important and urgent.

No; teams must keep re-checking with stakeholders.

The strategy is unclear, so teams spend too much time with stakeholders agreeing what to do and what to drop.

No visibility into running or upcoming work.

There's no transparency on running or upcoming initiatives; people don't know what other teams are working on.

No; initiatives run to their deadline.

Once prioritized, an initiative runs to completion; meeting the deadline is the ultimate goal.

Constantly interrupted and reshuffled.

Teams are made to shift priorities constantly, stopping initiatives before any insight and starting others without knowing why.

A side activity, staffing implicit.

Initiatives have no explicit cross-department staffing; people fit them in on top of their existing responsibilities.

Rigid and bureaucratic, slowing teams down.

Tools are strict and bureaucratic; teams waste time adapting to them instead of gaining performance.

Rare, giant, stressful releases.

Releases are huge and infrequent, and the process stresses teams.

'No bugs reported' is treated as success.

A release counts as successful if no bugs are reported; the business value it created is never evaluated.

All-or-nothing releases.

Releases only ever go to the whole audience; partial rollouts aren't possible.

No integration guidance; dependencies pile up.

Teams have no guidelines on how or when to integrate with others, so dependencies keep forming.

A source of conflict, no strategy.

Tech debt causes conflict between engineers and product managers, who have no clear strategy to benefit from it.

Piling up, impact unexplained.

Legacy debt keeps piling up; engineers cannot explain its impact and product teams are reluctant to prioritize it.

Off-market and rarely revisited.

Compensation is disconnected from current market conditions and seldom reviewed or adjusted.

Recruiters must sell every role.

Top talents rarely apply on their own; recruiters have to sell the role to get an application.

Weak; good hires are luck.

The hiring process is weak or absent, so bad hires slip through and great talent is landed only by accident.

Ad hoc, with no shared culture.

There's no clear onboarding; best practices aren't explained and the organization shares no common culture.

Retention is neither measured nor acted on.

The organization ignores retention: it doesn't measure satisfaction and takes no action to support it.

Development left to the individual.

There's no development program; once hired, people are expected to manage their own growth entirely.

Passive; you have to ask.

Managers don't recognize people proactively; employees must ask, or wait for fixed review points.

Strictly professional, no bonds.

The organization doesn't foster personal relationships; exchanges stay strictly professional, so teams bond only around work.

Slow and reactive; exits are rare.

Poor performers stay long enough to drag morale down and push good people out; the organization rarely initiates an exit.