Personal development plan
A personal development plan that starts with an honest assessment rather than a list of courses: where you are against the role you want, what the gap actually is, and month-by-month work that closes it. For yourself, or for somebody on your team.
- Asks for
- Where you are now — your current role and what you have actually done
- Where you are going: the role, level or one skill
- How long you have, from one month to twelve
- Gives back
- An honest assessment against the role, with evidence rather than exposure
- The gap, stated narrowly enough to act on
- Month-by-month work, each month producing something
- How you would know it worked, per month and overall
- Plan
- Pro and Max
- Use next
- Interview prep, CV maker, OKRs
What it gives you
Assessment — Strategy: thin. You have executed roadmaps; you have not set one. Evidence: three releases delivered, no quarter you chose the objective for. Month 1 — Write the quarter’s objective for your own area, with options you rejected. Produce: a one-pager your lead disagrees with in writing. Month 2 — Size one opportunity bottom-up. Produce: a market size with sources. Done when — you have set an objective that shipped and can say what it cost.
How it works
Most development plans are a reading list. They fail because they skip the assessment: without a clear statement of where somebody stands against the role they are aiming at, the plan is a set of activities with no way to tell whether any of them was the right one.
So the assessment comes first, across the parts of the role, and it is specific about evidence — what you have actually done, not what you have been exposed to. The gap that comes out of it is usually narrower and more awkward than expected, which is what makes the plan short enough to follow.
Then the work, month by month, over however long you have: one to twelve. Each month has something to produce rather than something to read, because the only reliable evidence of a skill is work that used it. You can plan the whole role or a single skill — a single skill over three months is the version people finish.
Who it is for
A PM planning their own next step, or a manager who owes somebody a development plan that is not a list of links.
Where it stops
It plans; you do the work, and a plan nobody follows is the normal outcome of a twelve-month one. It also assesses from what you tell it — an assessment built on a generous self-description produces a plan for somebody else. Written for someone on your team, it is told nothing about you.
Questions people ask
What should a personal development plan actually contain?
Three things: where you stand, where you are going, and work that moves you between them. Most plans have only the third, which is why they turn into reading lists — without an assessment there is no way to tell which activity matters, and without a destination there is no way to tell when you have arrived. The work itself should produce something, because produced work is the only evidence of a skill anybody can look at.
Should I plan for one skill or the whole role?
One skill over about three months is the version people finish. A whole-role plan over twelve months is useful as a map and almost never followed, because it asks for a change in everything at once. The practical approach is to use the whole-role assessment to find the narrowest gap that is in your way, and then plan that one properly.
Can I write a plan for someone on my team?
Yes, and it is a slightly different plan: the assessment is about them, so nothing about you is used in writing it, and the monthly work is framed as things you can both see evidence of. The useful discipline is the same either way — each month has to produce something, because a development conversation about whether somebody has grown goes nowhere without artefacts to point at.
Run it on your own work
Personal development plan needs an account, because it writes against what you give it and remembers what you have told it before. It is part of Pro and Max. Or see what the plans cost first.