Excel at managing product managers: Mariah Craddick at INDUSTRY 2025
Mariah Craddick is the Executive Director of Product at The Atlantic, and a fierce advocate for mentoring the next generation of media and production professionals. This was her first time attending INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, where she spoke about what it takes to build and manage a talented product team.
Watch the video in full or read on for her main takeaways.
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: there’s no blueprint for being a good manager. When a product manager is promoted to lead a team of PMs, it’s usually because they’re great at their current job. However, the same skills often don’t translate directly to managing people instead of products.
The trouble with being a good manager
When Mariah was promoted because she’d excelled as an individual contributor, she had to figure out how to apply her product skills to being a good manager—a role she takes very seriously. After all, she explains, managers can make or break your career, influencing your productivity, motivation, and mental health. A bad manager can even make you want to quit.
How does she define good and bad managers? The former communicate transparently and offer clear expectations, feedback, and sometimes even career guidance. They empower their team to own their respective domains, encouraging autonomy and independent decision making through active coaching.
The latter, on the other hand, have moving goalposts for good performance, withhold crucial information (whether deliberately or through poor communication), and are over-involved in discrete tasks or decision-making to the point of micromanagement. Their feedback is superficial or even nonexistent and they foster a competitive team environment that damages morale.
There’s a lot at stake when managing people: better management leads to improved outcomes both for the team’s impact and your own within the organization. And a lot of it relies on coaching your team’s varied responsibilities and skills into measurable impact, then evaluating their performance.
So, how do you do that?
The PM Competency Model
The job of a PM is notoriously difficult to define and, therefore, to distill into discrete areas of evaluation. Mariah herself admits that, when she first became a PM, she didn’t know how to assess if she was doing her job right. That just gets more difficult with added people-managing responsibilities.
To bring clarity to this complex task, Mariah introduces the PM Competency Model, by Ravi Mehta (formerly of Tinder and Reforge). This framework places the skills expected from this role into four categories:
Product execution:
- Product quality
- Product delivery
- Feature specification
Customer insight:
- Fluency with data
- Voice of the customer
- UX design
Influencing people:
- The ability to manage up
- Team leadership
- Stakeholder management
Product strategy:
- Owning business outcomes
- Product vision and roadmapping
- Strategic impact
But this isn’t a tool to be whipped out once or twice a year during review season or a blueprint for building the final report card.
How to make it active and actionable
The PM Competency Model works best when used in an exponential feedback loop. This means evaluating your PMs, delivering the evaluation, making a development plan together for the next cycle, then executing. Rinse and repeat.
“Always be talking about these things,” Mariah adds. “Do not wait until the annual review.”
She adopted this framework to make feedback sessions with her team more concrete and actionable while avoiding vague assessments like “strong performer”. They’re scheduled for every six weeks, separate from the weekly one-to-one meetings.
While this might seem like overdoing it, there’s strategic importance to the timing. One-on-ones are quick, tactical chats dedicated to solving the latest problems. Meanwhile, the PM evaluations are a chance to step away from firefighting and reflect on performance, career and product goals, and on broader alignment.
In these sessions, PMs compare their self-assessment with their manager’s feedback and receive input collected from peers throughout the team and organization. From there, they create a development plan for the next six weeks, with concrete goals to guide performance and measurable outcomes.
How does this framework apply to team AI adoption?
Rather than seeing AI adoption in and of itself as the goal, Mariah encourages her team to think about how LLMs can improve their performance as PMs.
AI isn’t a separate skill, but a horizontal tool that applies across the four areas of the framework, augmenting each of them. Here’s what that would look like.
Product execution:
- Draft PRDs
- More comprehensive user stories
- Develop mocks, prototypes
Customer insight:
- Take notes and transcribe interviews
- Summarize and synthesize research
- Conduct competitor analysis
Influencing people:
- Set team AI guidelines
- Share use cases and best practices
- Draft stakeholder updates
Product strategy:
- Inform product vision and strategy with scenario modelling, marketing analysis
Since AI should be used as a skill-enhancer, here are some questions to determine the value your product managers are getting out of it.
- How did using AI help you deliver faster without losing quality?
- What new insights did AI help you uncover about your space/product?
- How are you guiding and encouraging your team’s responsible use of AI tools?
- What time did you free up by using AI? What better-value task did you finish with that extra time?
While this can be a good place to start incorporating AI adoption into your feedback, it isn’t a one size fits all approach. You should always keep in mind your product managers’ individual competencies, skills, and level of comfort with AI.
As a final takeaway, Mariah emphasises that building and managing a talented product team isn’t just about getting them to ship the right features on schedule. It’s not something that just happens, but an ongoing process requiring intentional time, attention, and planning, along with a willingness to teach and learn from each other.
Access the full INDUSTRY 2025 recap here to discover more great product management goodness.
About the author
Alexandra Ciufudean
Alexandra is the newsletter editor at Mind the Product and a journalist with six years' experience covering tech, culture, and the online space. She's worked with New_Public and Untested and co-founded GRV Media's graduate writers' program.
