The Product Leaders Maturity Assessment

Understand how mature your organization is in creating the conditions for successful digital product work.

Why we do it

Creating a shared understanding of how effectively an organization is set up to develop, manage, and evolve digital products as a starting point for focused organizational development.

Part of our consulting approach

The assessment is an essential part of our consulting approach, which we call 'Context Setting'. Together with you, we select the participants to include in the assessment from different roles, responsibilities, and viewpoints across the organization. This matters because organizational maturity cannot be understood from a single perspective alone. Typically this includes:

Team members including developers, designers, architects, etc.
Team leads, line managers and other leadership roles
Middle management/leadership
Senior management/leadership
Customers and users
Other relevant stakeholders

The assessment includes a structured questionnaire tailored to the person's role in the organization and a personal interview.

Assessing the organization

It does not assess the maturity of a product, but the maturity of the organization behind digital product delivery. The model helps create a shared understanding of the current state and reveals where further development will have the greatest impact.

6 Levels and three domains

Our analysis covers three core domains: Process, Structure and Culture across six maturity levels.

Learn more about the Product Leaders Maturity Model

What we assess

Our assessment is conducted in three parts, one for each domain. Participants receive an invitation to a questionnaire adapted to their respective role and a personal interview.

Process

The process domain focuses on how product-related work is actually carried out in practice.

14 aspects with up to 121 questions
Questions are specific to role
Closed questions with a Likert scale
Space for open-ended responses

The process domain covers topics such as:

How teams work and what they rely on
What they focus on
Consistency of processes and outcomes
How transparent work is made
Balancing demand and delivery capability
Which and how metrics are used
How planning and forecasting happen
How priorities are set
How decisions are made
How policies are applied
How dependencies are managed
Agile practices, principles, and patterns

Structure

The structure domain looks at how the organization is set up to support effective digital product work.

7 aspects with up to 59 questions
Questions tailored to role
Closed and open-ended responses
Inspection artifacts, policies, etc.

The structure domain covers areas such as:

Distribution of skills
Development of capabilities
Responsibility and accountability
Where decisions are made
Clarity of product or service vision
Goal setting
Strength of product or service strategy

This helps us understand how responsibilities, capabilities, direction, and decision rights support or limit product success.

Culture

The culture domain is explored through both a survey and personal interviews with participants in the assessment.

12 aspects with up to 37 questions
Questions tailored to role
Personal interview by a coach
Formal statements about culture

Unlike the quantitative parts of the assessment, the qualitative part is based on a small number of open questions that are explored further depending on the answers given.

At its core, the interview looks at two things:

The organization's formal statements about culture: what it says it stands for and aims to achieve.
The organization's implicit cultural assumptions: the norms, beliefs, and unwritten rules that shape decisions and behavior in everyday work.

This helps us understand the lived reality behind formal structures and processes.

Connecting the dots

A core part of the interviews is what we call Connecting the Dots: We examine how the findings across all domains fit together.

Do the perspectives shared in the interviews match the results from the process and structure questionnaires?
Where do they reinforce each other? Where do they differ?
What tensions, contradictions, or blind spots become visible?
We also explore how the organization deals with conflict: Are conflicts addressed openly? Avoided? Escalated? Silenced?

This part of the assessment is especially valuable because it creates a protected space in which people can name things as they are. We deliberately aim to include voices that bring a critical perspective and raise issues they want to see changed in the organization. These perspectives are essential for building a more complete and honest picture of organizational reality.

How the assessment works

We usually begin with the questionnaires sent out in sequence of domains rather than all at once. This makes participation more manageable, since the assessment requires time and attention from the people involved.

Time commitment

We designed the assessment to be thorough, while still realistic for busy professionals. The typical effort for each domain per participant is:

Process: 60 to 90 minutes
Structure: about 60 minutes
Culture: 30 minutes + 40 minutes interview

Progress of questionnaire completion is visible to administrators of the organization.

Interview quality

Interviews are not only about collecting answers, that's why they are conducted by certified leadership trainers and professional coaches certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

They are able to recognize subtle signals, read between the lines, ask targeted follow-up questions, and surface patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.

Confidentiality

Everything shared in the interviews is treated confidentially. Participants are not quoted by name in the analysis report. Instead, the content is consolidated, anonymized, and detached from individual identities.

This creates the trust needed for candid conversations while ensuring that the findings are embedded in the broader organizational context.

What happens after the assessment?

The Product Leaders Maturity assessment is the starting point for targeted organizational development.

The assessment serves as a baseline for the engagement. Because it is grounded in the Product Leaders Maturity Model, it helps us derive focused measures that enable the organization to move toward the next level of maturity.

Comprehensive analysis report
Practical foundation for prioritizing action
Meaningful and context-specific insights

Many organizations choose to repeat the assessment after a certain period to see where improvements have been achieved and which areas still require further attention. This provides an evidence-based view of organizational development.

The Product Leaders maturity assessment helps organizations understand where they stand today, what patterns shape their current reality, and what needs to change to move forward with greater clarity and impact.

Understand your current maturity.
Define your next step with clarity.

Explore how the Product Leaders Maturity Assessment can help you create a clear picture of your organization's current state and build the foundation for focused development.