PM Evaluation Framework

A working library of frameworks, templates, rubrics, and Claude skills for product managers. Built around the artifacts that actually go up the chain: strategy memos, PRDs, launch checklists, metrics dashboards, kill / continue decisions. Not for case-interview prep.

The material covers the full lifecycle, from framing a problem and running customer discovery through launch readiness and post-launch metrics. Two design choices distinguish it from a generic PM checklist library.

Discovery is treated as technique, not philosophy. The repo includes a Mom-Test customer-interview coach (with the rules behind why "would you use this?" produces fluff and "when's the last time that happened?" produces signal), a Lean-Startup-grounded value-hypothesis stress-tester, and substantive framework docs underneath each. The principles are tactical: what to ask, what to ignore, what counts as evidence.

Every primary skill chains into an adversarial second pass. The pm-red-team skill takes the output of any other skill (or any external AI critique, or your own draft) and re-reviews it under a different lens. Most artifacts that "look fine" do so because the first reviewer applied the comfortable lens. The second pass picks a different one. The point matches a working principle from my chief-of-staff setup: critically evaluate AI output, don't defer to it.

The repo organizes around one question: what does a good PM actually do at each stage of the work, and how do we know? The five evaluation criteria below answer it. Everything else (frameworks, decision-making docs, cross-functional traps, rubrics, templates, skills) feeds those five.

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Personalize this for your own use

If you forked or cloned this repo, do these steps in order. Each one is concrete — you should be able to copy-paste and run.

1. Fork the repo and re-clone your fork. On GitHub, fork kalyvask/pm-evaluation-framework, then git clone git@github.com:<you>/pm-evaluation-framework.git. Edit LICENSE to your name and update the intro of this README to reflect your perspective.

2. Install the Claude skills so they work in every project, not just this repo. The nine skills under .claude/skills/ auto-load when Claude Code is opened inside this repo. To make them available everywhere, copy them into your user-level skills directory:

   mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
   cp -r .claude/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

   Restart Claude Code. Run /skills to confirm the nine pm-* skills are listed. If you only want a subset, copy individual skill folders.

3. Add your own artifact templates. Put new templates in templates/ alongside prd-template.md, decision-memo.md, decision-log.md, launch-criteria.md, and blameless-postmortem.md. Match the existing voice (imperative, section-headed, no jargon) so the skills can find and reuse them.

4. Customize rubric weights and criteria for your team's bar. The three rubrics in rubrics/ — pm-evaluation-rubric.md, strategy-memo-rubric.md, product-review-rubric.md — are deliberately editable. Re-weight criteria, add team-specific ones (e.g. "addresses regulated-data path"), or replace the five top-level questions in the The five evaluation criteria section below. The skills cite these files by path, so they pick up your edits automatically.

5. Extend or override skills with your own voice and style. To add a new skill: copy SKILL.md.tmpl into a new folder under .claude/skills/<your-skill>/SKILL.md and fill in the front-matter description (this is what Claude pattern-matches against). To change the voice of an existing skill: edit its SKILL.md directly — tighten the prose, add your own anti-patterns, or point it at frameworks you added in steps above.

6. Keep your private material local — it's already gitignored. .gitignore already excludes drafts/, local/, private/, outputs/, .cache/, *.draft.md, *.local.md, CVs, PDFs, DOCX, and .env*. Use these for unredacted notes, in-flight memo drafts, your CV, and any private artifact you want a skill to reason over without committing it. Sanity-check with git status before every commit.

7. Smoke-test that personalization worked. From inside Claude Code, ask: "Use the pm-evaluator skill to grade this draft memo: [paste]" — confirm the skill triggers and cites your edited rubric. Then ask: "Use pm-framework-selector for [your situation]" — confirm the skill routes you to the right framework.

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How to use this repo

If you want to...	Start here
Pick the right framework for the decision in front of you	frameworks/00-overview.md
Sharpen how you frame a problem before jumping to solutions	decision-making/problem-framing.md
Think clearly about reversibility before committing	decision-making/risk-and-reversibility.md
Decide between user research methods (personas vs. JTBD vs. Kano)	decision-making/research-methods.md
Run a customer-discovery interview that actually produces signal	decision-making/customer-interviews.md
Stress-test the value hypothesis behind a product before committing	decision-making/value-hypothesis.md
Argue defensibility honestly — which moat, with what evidence	decision-making/competitive-moat.md
Adversarially re-review an existing critique before acting on it	pm-red-team skill
Prioritize a backlog	decision-making/prioritization.md
Define what to measure	decision-making/metrics.md
Work better with engineering	cross-functional/engineering-partnership.md
Run a launch where some failure is expected	cross-functional/failure-management.md
Understand how AI is changing the PM role	ai-and-pm.md
Evaluate a PM's reasoning on a case	rubrics/pm-evaluation-rubric.md
Evaluate a strategy memo before it goes up the chain	rubrics/strategy-memo-rubric.md
Show up well in a product / exec review	rubrics/product-review-rubric.md
Use a PRD / decision-memo / decision-log / postmortem template	templates/

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Claude skills

The repo ships with nine Claude Code skills under .claude/skills/. They use the frameworks in this repo as their substrate, and they're organized by where you are in the product lifecycle.

Stage	Skill	Use when
Frame	pm-framework-selector	You have a decision in front of you and don't know which framework to reach for
Frame / decide	pm-decision-coach	You want to be walked through a decision: framing → research → prioritization → risk
Discover	pm-customer-interview-coach	You're prepping or debriefing customer interviews and want them stress-tested against the Mom Test rules
Discover	pm-value-hypothesis-tester	You're about to launch, fundraise, or scale, and you want the underlying what / who / how bet pressure-tested
Build	pm-prd-drafter	You're starting a PRD, have a draft to critique, or are stuck on problem / success / scope
Launch	pm-launch-reviewer	You have a launch coming up and want a gate-by-gate pre-flight against a real readiness bar
Measure	pm-metrics-critic	You're locking success criteria, debating a North Star, or staring at a dashboard that "looks fine"
Review	pm-evaluator	You want a strategy memo, PRD, or analysis graded against the five-criterion rubric before it goes up
Challenge	pm-red-team	You have an existing critique (from another skill, an external AI, or yourself) and want it adversarially re-reviewed before you act on it

To use them locally, drop the repo in a directory Claude Code can see — the skills will appear automatically. New skills follow the format in SKILL.md.tmpl.

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The five evaluation criteria

Every framework in this repo ladders up to five questions that travel with you across any product decision:

1. Did you identify the right problem before jumping to solutions?
2. Did you apply a framework to remove bias and surface stakeholder perspectives?
3. Did you account for bundle effects and the full user journey — including procurement, admin, and downstream teams?
4. Did you define what success and failure look like upfront?
5. Did you prototype or validate before committing real resources?

The full rubric is in rubrics/pm-evaluation-rubric.md.

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License

MIT. Use it, fork it, ship better products.