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Welcome to the product-training wiki! This is where all of the actual content lives.
- We learn by doing.
- Challenge motivates curiosity.
- Repetition is necessary.
- Classmates are the best tutors.
- Active reflection cements knowledge.
The product management curriculum is divided into several main themes:
- Introduction to product management
- Defining the problem space
- Choosing a strategy
- Building the product
- Shipping the product
- What happens after you ship
- Communicating about your product
- Handling curveballs and unexpected events
There are also many topics from other disciplines that are valuable for PMs to be familiar with.
This section is for anyone who leads an organization where people are learning product management, or for anyone who manages someone who is learning product management.
Everyone learns best by doing, and employees should go through this curriculum while working on an active product. It's also important that they have a safe environment where there's room to get messy and make mistakes.
Learning how to be a PM is just like any training and development project: you need to work on a problem that matters, but isn't mission critical.
The organization has to be healthy even if (or when) the project moves slowly, goes over budget, or has technical failures. Those challenges create some of the best learning moments that the team will have, but only if leadership stands back and lets the team fix the problem.
Good mentorship helps you learn faster. Experts help you understand what it means to do something well, and can share tips and tricks to help you do better next time. The best mentors also know when to let you stumble and when to catch you before you fall, so that you learn as much as possible. Any organization that is helping employees learn a new role should also make sure that highly-skilled mentors are available to everyone who's going through training.
Great product managers share some core personality traits, and one of them is a passion for creating meaningful outcomes. Product managers thrive when you give them an inspirational vision and the freedom to make strategic choices in support of that goal. And they tend to withdraw when you give them a meaningless goal to achieve: they'll get it done, but you will lose out on their strategic instincts and leadership abilities.
It's easy to fall back on your usual standards for judging whether or not a project is successful. However, in an environment where learning is one of your top goals, you need to adjust your evaluation criteria. The following are all useful metrics for judging how well your team is doing as they learn a new way of delivering products.
If you want your team to learn, you cannot punish them for making mistakes. This makes them afraid to fail, and undermining a powerful teaching tool.
Instead of judging teams based on whether or not they successfully meet their goals, evaluate how they handle their failures. The should reflect on mistakes in a systematic way:
- Identifying the root cause of the failure.
- Identifying external forces that affect their success.
- Identifying the cost, or project impact, of the failure.
- Proposing a plan to react to the failure.
- Identify, and communicate, the benefits of their new plan.
Early in the process, teams need to focus on simply walking through these steps. As they get more familiar with the pattern, you can push them to do a better job on each individual step.
At first, your team will not be skilled at identifying risks. They will make mistakes that appear careless, or ignore warning signs that seem obvious to you. That's a normal part of the learning process.
Instead of judging your teams by the number of risks that they fail to mitigate, you should evaluate whether or not they become more skilled over time.
- How long does it take the team to identify and act on risks?
- Does the team identify and act on risks more quickly as the project progresses?
Nobody is omniscient, and nobody makes a perfect plan. Doubling down on planning doesn't lead to success — rapidly evaluating and incorporating new information does. You should hold your teams accountable for constantly updating their vision as they learn. They should follow a systematic process:
- Establishing ground truth. What are the facts?
- Identifying the implications. What do these facts mean for the project?
- Assessing the current plan. Does the path we're on lead us to success?
- Proposing next steps. What should we do now?
- Communicating the benefits of the path forward. Why is this the right thing to do?
In the beginning, teams need to practice repeating these steps and may need prompting to share their thoughts outwards. As they gain experience, you can hold them accountable for proactively working through this process and sharing their conclusions with you.