The Superpower Overlap Test
Find your true strengths via a two-layer self-plus-peer assessment, then only take roles where your superpower meets the company's.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Because strengths are largely fixed early in life, Kamat argues you should identify your genuine superpowers and only take roles where the company's need overlaps with them. Strengths can be surfaced scientifically (formal psych assessments, Ray Dalio's PrinciplesYou, StrengthsFinder) or simply — every PM does the same handful of tasks (roadmap, strategy, managing engineers, stakeholder management, launch, analytics), so notice which ones you're great at and enjoy. The sharpest version is a two-layer assessment: how good you think you are, cross-checked against how peers rate you; the overlap is your true strength.
Origin
Mayur Kamat, drawing on Agoda's $5,000 six-hour psych assessments, Ray Dalio's strengths tool (demoed at a Binance offsite), and the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 (Gallup, formerly 'Now, Discover Your Strengths').
Core principles
- 01Strengths get defined very early and are hard to change — build around them, don't fight them
- 02The truest strength is where your self-rating and peers' rating overlap
- 03Every PM does the same core tasks; your strength is the subset you're great at AND enjoy
- 04Match your superpower to the company's superpower — resonance predicts acceleration
- 05Strength tests feel good: they name what you're best at, never what you 'suck at'
How to run it
- 1
Inventory the standard PM tasks
List the recurring work: designing the roadmap, forming product strategy, managing engineers, stakeholder/marketing/compliance management, launching, and tracking analytics.
Pro tip If ticket-tracking and chasing people in Jira is the worst part of your job, avoid structured/complex stakeholder-heavy roles; if brainstorming 15 conversion experiments is agony, growth roles aren't your strength.
- 2
Rate yourself, then get peers to rate you
Score how good you think you are at each; then have your team/leadership vote on the same axes. The overlap between the two is where your real strength lies.
Pro tip Formal tools (PrinciplesYou ~$50, StrengthsFinder 2.0) accelerate this and are far more accessible than a six-hour psych assessment.
Watch out Self-perception alone is unreliable — the peer layer is what corrects it.
- 3
Match superpower to the company's superpower
When evaluating a role, ask what your superpower is and what the company's superpower is, and whether they feed each other. Strong resonance predicts fast growth regardless of location or comp.
Pro tip Interrogate why they're hiring you — if it's for tasks you're competent at but don't love, expect low fun and low acceleration.
In the wild
Agoda paid a psychologist $5,000 per PM candidate for a six-hour assessment covering IQ percentiles (pattern recognition, structured thinking, numerical, verbal) plus a strengths/weaknesses profile on a dominance-x-warmth 'Q4' quadrant. Kamat resisted taking it as insulting after 15 years in product, then found it 'incredibly spot on.'
→ Convinced him a rigorous strengths read is worth it; he only took it because he was simultaneously getting his gifted-seeming son tested.
Leaving Airbnb, host Lenny took a strengths test with an executive coach who read the results and said the strengths popping up were exactly what a founder needs, pointing him toward starting his own company.
→ Lenny calls it 'a huge win' that helped him make the career move.
Common mistakes
Trusting only self-assessment
Rating only how good you think you are misses blind spots; the peer-vote layer is what turns a guess into a calibrated strength.
Taking a role for skills you don't enjoy
Being hired for competent-but-joyless tasks kills the virtuous cycle — you won't have fun, so you won't compound, and eventually you won't even be great at it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone deciding on a role change who wants to match innate strengths to a job's demands
Not ideal for
Situations demanding you deliberately stretch into a genuine weakness for growth reasons
From the transcript
“you need to know what you're great at, what are your superpowers, and you need to find jobs where success is determined by how much…”
“there's a your components tells you how good you think you are and then it has your leadership team vote you on certain different aspects”
“the overlap is where your true strengths are”
“try and evaluate the overlap of superpowers, right? What is your superpower? What is the company's superpower? Will they feed each other?”
“at Agoda we used to pay a a psychologist $5,000 for every single PM we interview”
From the episode
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more
Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)