Every day is a school day
To be a Product Manager means to be constantly learning.
There’s the obvious stuff, like learning the fundamentals of how to do the job itself, just to get started with the profession. Paths vary into Product Management; some come from commercial roles, some technical, some creative. All need to understand the basic function of the role.
However, to be good at your job, to make progress, you need to realise early that you don’t know all the answers and you’re going to have to continue to learn every single day.
The very nature of product management is that you start from the position of little information, you explore, ask questions, form hypotheses and test ideas. Of course, you then need to analyse results and iterate. In other words, continuously learn.
If you believe you already know the answers, or thought your education ended in the hazy summer days of your youth, well, Product Management is probably not for you.
How do Product Managers learn at carwow?
Like most businesses, carwow invests in its employees through formal training, such as courses or conferences. In the past year we’ve greatly benefited from product management courses from Reforge & Lenny Rachitsky, whilst an inspiring workshop on the subject of ‘empathy’, led by Helen Hatton, has enabled us to improve our interactions with both internal stakeholders and customers.
However, today I want to focus on informal learning. Three approaches, in particular.
- Individual-led Learning & Development sessions
- Experiment critiques
- Book Clubs
Individual-led Learning & Development sessions
Our L&D sessions are designed to capitalise on the knowledge and interests within the product management team. As a group, we have diverse backgrounds, experience and strengths and collectively we have the capability to help each other grow.
The set-up is simple. The team brainstorm topics, we vote to ascertain interest and then individuals nominate themselves to lead a future session on a given subject.
As a host, you’re required to research the subject (if necessary) and then prepare the session structure and content. You’re a facilitator and are not expected to be an expert on the topic. You don’t even need to produce original content, you can take something pre-existing and use it as a prompt to generate discussion, or bring in an expert to help.
Structure can vary depending on the subject matter and the preference of the host. One session can be presentation-based, another could be activity-based. Ultimately the goal is to share knowledge among the team and find takeaways we can apply to our work.
To date, topics have included:
- Product management frameworks
- Leadership
- Identifying and testing assumptions
- Collaboration and influence
- Experiment set-up and assessment
- Quasi-experimentation (definitely with a guest speaker!)
For my own session, I talked about influencing people’s behaviour using psychology. It’s not often you get to talk about solving public urination problems at work, but it was such a great example of how nudges can be applied to aid decision-making. Explore the deck if you’d like to learn a little more about Salience, Certainty Effect, Autonomy Bias and more.
Experiment critiques
For our second method, I was inspired by old episodes of TV medical drama, ER. As a teaching hospital, the student doctors would have to present their thinking and actions on specific cases to the experienced members of the faculty. The goal being to reflect on what occurred, learn and apply to future situations. In a slightly less life-or-death situation, we take the same approach with our experiments.
Each month, PMs meet to discuss our work. Volunteers walk through their experiments. The outcome of the experiment is of less importance, what interests us is the thinking behind it. Volunteers are quizzed on the problem definition, hypotheses are challenged and the risks, executions and insights debated.
Looking forwards
Within the last year we have expanded the scope of the critique. Participants can now choose to share either a completed experiment or their thinking behind a new one they’re considering. Instead of reflecting on the past to inform the future, we can shape the present by using the group to sense-check our thinking, get feedback and make course corrections before we build a new experiment.
It can be challenging to present your thinking to your peers, but it can be immensely rewarding. A willingness to be vulnerable helps — to quote Brené Brown from her TED talk “vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change”.
Book club
The final approach to learning is the good old book club. If you’re not familiar with the concept — everyone reads set chapters of the same book and then get together regularly to discuss what resonates. These can be fun discussions, particularly when readers disagree with the author, or with other readers.
At carwow, Product Managers submit their preferences for new books to read and after a little discussion, our resident Book Club host, Group PM Jack Burrows, picks the new reading material. We typically read 100 pages or so over the course of a month and then meet — remembering to bring our lunch — to discuss our thoughts and ideas.
We take actions too. Sometimes during discussion we identify ideas that we agree could benefit us individually or as a group. Example actions from recent discussions include:
- Lightning feedback — share early draft documents in the team Slack channel to get quick feedback
- Build empathy — PMs to do more ‘dog-fooding’ to see the product through a customer’s eyes
- Customer snapshots — build a database of pain points and opportunities collected from customer calls
If you want to add to your reading list, some of our recent books include:
There are other methods we use to educate ourselves (e.g. podcasts, online courses, articles, etc.), but these three are built into our schedules, a commitment from the Product Leadership to ensure we all get an opportunity to continue to grow.
Self-led learning with our peers is a fine example of carwow’s values in action — proactively and collaboratively feeding our curiosity. To question, to understand and to improve.
If carwow sounds like your kind of company, check out our careers page for product roles, including Product Manager, Engineers, Designers and many more.
