The PMwheel in Action: How Novo Nordisk Is Promoting Ownership of Growth and Learning Among Product Managers

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you might be familiar with the PMwheel, a tool I designed to be a structured yet flexible "compass" for product management growth. If this is the first time you’re hearing about the PMwheel, you might want to hop over to this post to learn a bit more about it (and if you’re a product leader who’s interested in how you can make use of the PMwheel, I’d suggest starting here).

Since I created the PMwheel, I’ve loved seeing how it’s been adopted and adapted by different audiences. Over the years, I’ve collected stories of what this has looked like in different settings, and today I’m excited to share the story of Novo Nordisk’s approach to using the PMwheel.

Context first: My collaboration with Novo Nordisk

Here’s a quick overview of my experience with Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical company that’s taken a bold approach to ensure its product teams are equipped for the challenges of digital transformation. Since 2021, I’ve had the privilege of working with Novo Nordisk’s product leaders, first in a series of one-on-one leadership coaching sessions and later by supporting their Capability Building team, which oversees upskilling the company’s product managers. Over the past year, this team has adopted the PMwheel as a central tool for product manager development and adapted it as their primary capabilities framework.

Novo Nordisk’s journey with the PMwheel has involved in-depth workshops, self-assessment sessions, and continuous adaptations to meet the unique demands of their global and regulated environment.

Their goal is for this framework to become an essential part of their toolkit for fostering product excellence and enhancing cross-functional alignment. As Louise Hjernø, Director, Digital Capability Building at Novo Nordisk, explains, “Through collaboration with our internal product people to define their roles and responsibilities, it’s evident that role clarity is key to unlocking a product operating model. Role frameworks align expectations and foster effective teamwork, driving Novo Nordisk’s digital transformation successfully.”

A Conversation with Simen Dahle: Bringing the PMwheel to Life

In this interview, we’ll dive into a conversation with Simen Dahle, a member of Novo Nordisk's Digital Transformation Office who’s responsible for building capabilities across the organization. He’ll share how the PMwheel has supported their goals, the adaptations they made to fit Novo’s specific context, and the impact they are hoping to see on product teams’ alignment and effectiveness after rollout. This interview was conducted by my blog editor, Melissa Suzuno.

Q: Can you start by sharing a little about your role at Novo Nordisk?

Simen Dahle, Associate Digital Capability Partner at Novo Nordisk

Simen: I'm from Norway originally but moved to Denmark to study at Copenhagen Business School. I started with Novo Nordisk in February 2022 and joined the Digital Transformation Office in October 2023, where I'm currently working as an Associate Digital Capability Partner.

I work on various initiatives that span everything from skill-specific training and upskilling workshops to coaching programs and role-specific frameworks. Our focus for 2024 has been around role professionalization within product management, particularly clarifying and supporting the product owner and product manager roles.

Q: What led you to consider a more formal assessment approach for product capabilities?

Simen: Since we’re a relatively young team, we had to start by building a foundational understanding of what our teams actually need. Working with Petra and Shaun Russell in a coaching capacity initially helped us identify where product management at Novo Nordisk was succeeding and where we needed more support. Through these coaching debriefs and broader assessments of our digital capabilities, we realized that one way to mature as a product organization was by creating clear expectations for our product folks. These types of expectations tend to be found in role definitions, but the ones we had were quite basic. So we decided to start by improving our role definitions.

For example, many individual contributors didn’t fully understand how their job descriptions translated to their day-to-day work. Leaders, on the other hand, sometimes struggled to evaluate and support their teams effectively because there wasn’t a consistent understanding of the product roles across disciplines. So we needed something that could help elevate this clarity for both individual contributors and leaders.

I think it’s also important to stress the fact that our goal was always to support building individuals’ capabilities rather than creating a checklist that would evaluate whether they were good enough or not. That was never the point.

Q: What preconditions did you need to meet before developing this assessment tool?

Simen: Before we could even think about an assessment, we needed clear, consistent role standards. We sat down to define what’s expected of our product managers and owners and put these expectations into a role description that could apply across job levels. This role clarity process involved input from everyone—current product owners, line managers, and external insights from Petra and Shaun—to ensure it reflected both industry best practices and our organization’s unique context. It took us a good six months to achieve this since it required a lot of alignment across the board. We were working on other projects at the same time, but I think it’s important to share that this was a major effort.

Q: Why did you choose to adapt the PMwheel rather than creating a new assessment from scratch?

Simen: Once we aligned on our expectations, we could think about activating them in a way that made sense for Novo Nordisk. That’s where the PMwheel came in as a framework for our self-assessment, connecting the role descriptions to people’s actual work and prompting reflection from both contributors and leaders.

One of the things we really liked about the PMwheel was the fact that it prompted dialogue between product owners and their leaders, and it could lead to really deep, meaningful discussions about the individual contributor’s career trajectory. It also puts the product owner/manager in the driver’s seat, giving them a sense of ownership over their career.

We had worked with Petra for quite a while as a coach and consultant, so it was natural to consider using her PMwheel as a foundation. Petra’s framework is thorough and well-designed, with dimensions and questions that make sense across a range of organizations.

We asked ourselves, “Why start from scratch when there’s already a tool designed for this purpose?” That said, the PMwheel is quite comprehensive. So we needed to simplify it a bit to keep the time investment manageable for our leaders and contributors.

We adapted the wheel by reducing the focus areas from eight to six and tailoring the questions to balance the needs of experienced product professionals with those new to product management. We wanted everyone to find it accessible, but still valuable. Our goal was to create something that was simple enough for people without a lot of product background knowledge to jump in and feel confident using, but not something that felt overly simplistic to experienced product professionals.

I’ll also add that we’ve been thinking of this as an experiment to start out with. We want to see what works, what doesn’t work, and we can then make changes when we introduce this framework to other roles, such as designers.

Ultimately, we would like to digitize the tool to make it an interactive and valuable user experience, and to collect organizational data over time.

A few example pages from the tool Novo Nordisk is using to foster growth conversations between leaders and product managers/owners.

Q: Can you tell us about the process of rolling out this assessment?

Simen: We wanted the rollout to be adaptable. Leaders and product owners start by engaging in the self-assessment, but how they do it may vary. Some leaders work with their product owners one-on-one, while others put product owners into pairs for a discussion before starting the dialogue with their manager.

Whatever the approach, it’s important that leaders communicate the purpose and intention behind this assessment—that it’s about development rather than evaluation. The goal of going through this exercise is really to help them find their next learning topic, so after completing their self-assessment, product owners share insights with their leaders to kick off more targeted conversations about their development goals.

We’ll collect feedback from these conversations to refine the tool further, but the priority is to ensure these discussions are as useful and actionable as possible.

With the data we collect, we’re also trying to create an overall capability status of the product organization. We’ll be able to see that people are generally strong in this area or lacking in that one. And with that knowledge, we’ll be able to provide specific training and more targeted upskilling opportunities.

Q: What outcomes are you hoping to see from this tool in the longer term?

Simen: Our primary goal is more clarity and meaningful career conversations. We want both individual contributors and leaders to be better aligned on what it means to be in a product management role at Novo Nordisk. One interesting outcome we’re already seeing is leaders using this tool to guide mentoring conversations, even for team members who aren’t in product management yet but are interested in exploring it.

Ultimately, we hope to build a more supportive environment where product owners and managers feel empowered in their roles.

Q: Finally, do you have any advice for product leaders considering a similar framework?

Simen: I’d say start simple and treat it as an experiment. Be genuinely curious about your people’s work and give them room to reflect. Every organization’s needs are different, so start with a basic framework, see how it works, and adjust as you go. Even a simple step like showing that you care about people’s growth can have a big impact.

Final thoughts from Petra

Novo Nordisk’s journey with the PMwheel is a prime example of how an established framework can be tailored to fit specific organizational contexts. By adapting the PMwheel to address their unique challenges, they’ve created a powerful tool for aligning expectations and fostering development conversations across their product teams.

Simen and the Digital Transformation Office are already seeing promising outcomes in engagement and role clarity—and as they continue iterating, this framework will likely play an integral role in shaping product excellence at Novo Nordisk for years to come.

Looking for more inspiration? Check out the PMwheel and all my other resources for product leaders and product managers here.