Self-assessment: which belt should you start at?
Status: drafted · Time: 5 min · Audience: everyone Outcome: Choose the right starting point by evidence, not confidence.
The rule
Section titled “The rule”Start at the first belt whose boss fight you cannot already pass.
Not the belt that sounds impressive. Not the belt your title suggests. Not the belt your manager hopes the team will reach by quarter-end. The first belt whose evidence you do not yet have.
This keeps the playbook honest. A curious PM may belong at White Belt for coding and already be strong in Ops 101. A staff engineer may skip the software vocabulary and still need Yellow Belt habits around permissions, prompt quality, and AI-assisted PRs in the Razorpay harness.
Belts are not the PM L1–L5 rubric
Section titled “Belts are not the PM L1–L5 rubric”Razorpay Product also has a PM-specific AI-proficiency framework. It answers a different question from this page.
| System | Question it answers | Evidence to use |
|---|---|---|
| Playbook belts | Where should I start learning? | The first boss fight you cannot pass yet. |
| PM AI-proficiency L1–L5 | How does the Product Function describe my AI proficiency as a PM? | The criteria in the published PM framework and evidence from your work. |
Do not invent a conversion table. Yellow Belt does not mean L2; Black Belt does not mean L4. Your belt and PM proficiency level can differ without contradiction because one routes learning and the other describes role proficiency.
Use two questions:
- Placing yourself in the curriculum? Use the boss-fight rule on this page.
- Discussing PM AI proficiency? Use the published L1–L5 criteria. Treat the adoption dashboard as one input, not the rubric itself.
The published ladder is PM-specific. Do not assume its labels apply unchanged to Design, Engineering, or another function.
Quick placement
Section titled “Quick placement”| If this is true today | Start here |
|---|---|
| You are not sure what frontend, backend, API, database, Git, or deploy mean. | Part 0 — Foundation |
| You know the words, but you have never shipped a real PR. | White Belt |
| You can make small local changes, but have not opened a real Razorpay org PR with AI assistance. | Yellow Belt |
| You use AI daily for individual work, but your team does not yet have shared skills, context files, or repeatable workflows. | Green Belt |
| You already ship with agents, write reusable skills, and can improve the harness for others. | Black Belt |
| You are shaping standards, mentoring others, and contributing to the playbook itself. | Staff+ Council |
If two rows feel true, pick the lower one. Skipping ahead is cheap; discovering a missing foundation in the middle of a boss fight is expensive.
The three evidence checks
Section titled “The three evidence checks”Answer these without explaining yourself.
1. Can you open a repo, make a small change, run the relevant checks, and open a PR without someone sitting beside you?
If no, you are pre-Yellow. That is fine. White and Yellow exist for exactly this.
2. Can you describe what context the AI needs before it edits, and where that context should live for the next session?
If no, you are pre-Green. Green is where the move from “AI as helper” to “AI as team workflow” becomes explicit.
3. Have you built or materially improved a reusable skill, plugin, MCP, KB, or workflow that another team can adopt?
If no, you are pre-Black. Black is where the work stops being only your productivity and starts becoming org leverage.
What if you are here for Ops 101 only?
Section titled “What if you are here for Ops 101 only?”Good. Ops 101 is not a consolation track.
If your work is mostly meetings, tickets, planning, partner follow-ups, or stakeholder communication, start with Track 0B — Ops 101. The boss fight there is real: automate one workflow that saves 4+ hours per week and document the recipe so a teammate can fork it.
That evidence matters even if you never touch a repo.
What you should carry forward
Section titled “What you should carry forward”- Start from evidence, not confidence.
- Keep playbook belts separate from the PM L1–L5 proficiency rubric.
- Pick the lower belt when in doubt.
- Ops 101 is a real track with a real boss fight.
- You can always skip forward after proving the earlier evidence.
- The next chapter, §0.11 — The safety brief, is required no matter where you start.
Previous: ← 0.9 How to use this playbook as a team lead · Next: → 0.11 The safety brief