Character, Competency, and Craft
When I assess a PM, whether to hire, to coach, or to promote, I sort everything they bring into a spectrum from hard-to-teach to easy-to-teach. It is the most practical mental model I have for developing people, because it tells you where to spend coaching energy and, more importantly, what to screen for in hiring that you will never be able to install later. The headline is simple. Hire for the things you cannot teach, train the things you can, and do not confuse the two.
#The spectrum
This is one of my own frameworks, Skill-Coaching × Effort, and it lays out five layers, hardest to teach on the left, easiest on the right:
| Layer | Examples | How teachable | Where you address it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Character traits | Humility, empathy, integrity, growth mindset, decisiveness, resilience, values | Barely; set early, change slowly | Hire for it. Screen hard. |
| Competencies | Leadership, communication, collaboration, execution, critical thinking, analysis, creativity, strategy | Slowly, with real effort over years | Coach + experience (The Six Stages of Mastery) |
| Techniques | User stories, backlog management, research methods, data viz, working with eng, SQL | Months, with practice | Coach + reps |
| Processes | Scrum, Kanban, OKRs, JTBD, Kano, Design Sprint | Weeks | Train + a good doc |
| Tools | Jira, Amplitude, Figma, Optimizely, Intercom | Days | Train. Almost free. |
Read it right and the strategic point jumps out. The further left, the more it determines a PM's ceiling, and the less you can do about it after you hire. Tools and processes are trivially teachable, so they should carry almost no weight in a hiring decision, yet job descriptions are stuffed with them ("must know Jira, Amplitude, Mixpanel"). Character is nearly unteachable and determines everything, yet it is the hardest to assess in an interview, so it gets underweighted. That inversion is most hiring mistakes in one sentence.
#"Competent people with character"
Marty Cagan compresses the whole left side into a phrase I have never improved on: he staffs teams with competent people of character. Two words, both load-bearing.
Competence is necessary, because a PM who cannot do the job is a liability no matter how lovely. But competence without character is worse, because a capable person who lacks integrity, humility, or empathy will use their capability to win arguments, hide problems, and protect themselves over the user. Character is not a nice-to-have on top of skill. It is the thing that decides whether the skill points the right way.
In my experience the most dangerous hire is not the under-skilled one. That is visible and fixable. It is the highly competent one with a character flaw: the brilliant PM who is quietly contemptuous of engineers, or cannot say "I was wrong," or shades the data to look good. Their competence makes the damage bigger and harder to catch.
#What this means in practice
- Hiring: spend your hardest scrutiny on the left. Probe for humility ("tell me about a time you were wrong"), empathy (how they talk about past teams), and growth mindset (what they have learned recently). Assume you can teach Jira. See The PM Interview and Hiring Guide.
- Coaching: target competencies and techniques, the middle, where effort actually moves the needle. You cannot coach someone into having character, but you can build their Communication or Fluency with Data over a year. That is where coaching earns its keep.
- Don't fake it. You cannot coach a character flaw away with feedback. If someone's core issue is integrity or humility, no amount of Coaching and Feedback fixes it, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time. That is a hiring miss to correct, not a development plan.
#The myth of the well-rounded résumé
Here is the flip side. Do not reject a candidate because they have not used your stack. A PM of genuine character and strong competencies will learn your tools in a week. A PM with a perfect tool list and a brittle character will sink your team in a quarter. Hire left, train right. And note that character plus competency sits beneath shape. Shape tells you which competencies someone has. This spectrum tells you which of their gaps you can actually do something about.
#Continue Reading
- The PM Interview and Hiring Guide for screening the things you cannot teach.
- The Manager as Coach for where coaching energy actually pays off (the middle layers).
- The Six Stages of Mastery for how competencies deepen over a career, slowly.
- The T-Shaped PM and Knowing Your Shape for the layer above: which competencies you hold.
- Hiring and Building a Product Team for composing teams of competent people with character.