Altitude & Horizon Template
Two worksheets: the Cascading Context Map (the artifact you hand your team) and the Transition Self-Assessment (the private one you keep). Quality checks at the bottom.
Provenance
Based on The Product Porch E42 — From Product Manager to Director.
Worksheet 1: Cascading Context Map
The artifact. One page beats ten — the goal is clarity, not comprehensiveness.
## Context Cascade: [Team or Portfolio] — [Quarter]
**Company Priority:** [What leadership actually said, in their words. Quote it.]
**Business Unit Translation:** [How your BU contributes to that priority]
**Product Portfolio Translation:** [How your products contribute to that]
**Team Accountabilities:**
- [Team or person]: [what they own specifically]
- [Team or person]: [what they own specifically]
**Why this matters:** [The so-what. What changes, and what deliberately stays the same.]
**What I'm still unsure about:** [Name the gaps rather than papering over them.
Your team already suspects where the ambiguity is.]Repeat one block per company priority. Three to five priorities, not twenty bullets — if you can't cascade it, it wasn't a priority.
Worksheet 2: Transition Self-Assessment
Private. Diagnosis before prescription — name the zone before you try to fix the friction.
## Altitude & Horizon Self-Assessment — [Date]
### Where I'm operating today
**Altitude:** [Feature/team level -> portfolio/org level] — where am I actually spending time?
**Horizon:** [Sprint-to-quarter -> quarter-to-annual] — how far ahead am I actually looking?
Evidence, not aspiration: [what last week's calendar says about both]
### The four transition zones
| Zone | How I'm doing | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| 1. [Zone name] | [Strong / Developing / Weak] | [specific recent example] |
| 2. | | |
| 3. | | |
| 4. | | |
**Weakest zone:** [which one, and what it's costing]
### Waiter or operator?
- Last three times something broke, did I solve it or coach someone through it? [answer]
- What am I still doing that someone on my team could own? [list]
- What am I NOT doing that only I can do? [list]
### Hero Syndrome triggers
- I feel the pull to jump in when: [specific situations]
- The cost when I do: [what doesn't get done at director altitude]
### One change this month
[A single behavioral commitment, specific enough to check in 30 days]Quality checks
The cascade
- The company priority is quoted, not paraphrased into something tidier
- Three to five priorities, not a wall of bullets
- Every layer connects upward — a reader can trace team work to company strategy
- Team accountabilities name who owns what, not just what exists
- The "so-what" says what stays the same, not only what changes
- Gaps are named. Manufacturing false certainty costs more than admitting ambiguity
- It fits on one page
The honest test
- You wrote it without waiting for perfect clarity from above. Waiting is the PM habit; creating imperfect-but-useful clarity is the Director skill
- A team member could read it and answer "why am I working on this?" unprompted
The self-assessment
- Altitude and horizon are answered from your calendar, not your intentions
- Each zone rating cites a specific recent example
- The waiter/operator questions got uncomfortable answers — if none did, you rated yourself, not your behavior
- The one change is checkable in 30 days