Identifying Growth Areas
You've scored yourself (The Competency Self-Assessment). Now comes the move that separates a development plan from a wish list: choosing which gaps to actually work on. Not all weaknesses are worth your time, and the most common mistake I see is people grinding on the wrong ones.
#My point of view: pick the two weakest competencies that matter for your next level, not your two lowest scores
Those are different things. Your lowest raw score might be in a competency that is irrelevant to where you are going. Chasing it is how earnest PMs spend a year improving and still don't get promoted.
A growth area has to clear both screens:
- You're weak at it. Needs Focus on the 0-2 scale, or a 1-2 on the 1-5.
- It gates your next level. The bar genuinely rises here at the level above you (What Changes at Each Level).
Weak and load-bearing. A gap that fails screen 2 is a "nice to have," not a growth area.
#Why not just fix your lowest score?
Because of shape. The whole premise of The T-Shaped PM and Knowing Your Shape is that great PMs are spiky, and great products come from spiky people on balanced teams. Some of your low scores are genuinely fine. They are the valleys that let you have peaks, and a teammate covers them. Sanding every valley flat doesn't make you a great PM. It makes you a uniformly average one. The art is telling a fine weakness from a fatal one.
There is one place I don't tolerate a gap regardless of level, and that is Product Execution. You can be spiky everywhere else, but a PM who can't reliably ship isn't spiky. They are not yet doing the job. If a Product Delivery or Feature Specification gap shows up, it jumps the queue. Everything else is a multiplier on a base of: can this person get good product out the door.
#How to find the load-bearing gaps
A few methods, in the order I trust them.
- Diff your self-score against your manager's. The competencies where you rated yourself high and they rated you low are pure gold. They are blind spots, the gaps you can't see, which is what makes them the most dangerous. Start there.
- Read the level above you, behavior by behavior. Don't read your current level's column. Read the next one in The Master Competency Matrix. The behaviors that make you wince, the "I don't do that yet" ones, are your gates.
- Look at the floor rules. If you are in a score-gated system, the next level's floor rule names your gap for you: the category you can't drop below, or the soft skill that must hit a threshold. The system is telling you what to fix.
- Ask what blocked you last quarter. Reframe missed outcomes as competency gaps. A roadmap that kept slipping usually isn't bad luck. It is likely a prioritization or stakeholder gap wearing a disguise.
Cap it at two competencies, at most three when you get to the plan. A PM "working on" six things is working on nothing, and focus is a competency too. The growth plan structure enforces this on purpose.
#Strengths matter too, just differently
Identifying growth areas is not only about gaps. Your peaks are how you create disproportionate value, and at senior levels you are promoted on the strength of your spike far more than the absence of valleys. So I name the top strengths in the same pass, but I invest in them to turn "Masters" into "Teaches" (The Proficiency Scale), which is a leadership move, not a remediation one. Fix the fatal valley, and amplify the defining peak.
#Continue Reading
- Building a Growth Plan for turning the two gaps into 3 areas, 3 concrete tasks each.
- The Competency Self-Assessment for the scoring that feeds this.
- What Changes at Each Level for how the bar rises, so you know which gaps gate you.
- The T-Shaped PM and Knowing Your Shape for why some weaknesses are fine to keep.
- The Manager as Coach for the conversation where the diff gets surfaced.