20 honest yes/no questions across four areas. Answer for how things actually work — not how they're supposed to. You'll get a score and a read at the end.
How work moves from idea to production.
1. Do most items ship within two weeks of work actually starting on them?
2. Does your team deliver at least 80% of what it commits to in a sprint or cycle?
3. Can you release to production any day of the week without a special event?
4. Is unplanned work (urgent requests, hotfixes) under 20% of your team's capacity?
5. When something is blocked, does everyone know — and is unblocking someone's explicit job?
Whether you're building the right things.
6. Does each PM talk to at least one customer or user every week?
7. Does every major feature have a stated hypothesis and a success metric before it's built?
8. Do you regularly check whether shipped features actually moved their metric?
9. Have you killed or reversed at least one initiative in the last quarter based on evidence?
10. Is your roadmap framed around outcomes ("move metric X") rather than a list of features?
Whether meetings produce decisions or just consume calendars.
11. Does every recurring meeting have a clear purpose you could state in one sentence?
12. Do retro action items actually get done (most of them, most of the time)?
13. Are priorities decided in a known place by a known process — not in side Slack threads?
14. Can any team member say what the team's top priority is right now — and would answers match?
15. Do PMs spend less than half their week in recurring internal meetings?
Whether people can do their jobs.
16. Is it clear who makes the final call on product decisions — and is it respected?
17. Can a new PM become productive within their first month?
18. Do engineers understand why they're building what they're building?
19. When the same problem appears twice, does someone change the process — not just patch the symptom?
20. Would your PMs say the process helps them ship — rather than something they work around?
Bring your score to the call — it's a great starting map for where to look first.