4 great ways to on-board new Product Managers
For the second time this month, I joined a conversation for Product Managers focused on on-boarding. At Pivotal Labs, especially in the Boston office, we’re on-boarding new teammates all the time. After the Boston Product breakfast this morning, I realized we’re not the only ones trying to iron out the right process.
Obviously there is no “one right way.” But, I’ve heard a few great practices that were worth writing down and sharing.
[Step 1] Set expectations
Let’s face it, Product Management is not a fully defined position. As PMs get started, it’s a good idea for a manager to sit down and discuss expectations.
Adrian Jank (my teacher at the General Assembly Product Management class) put something like this on the whiteboard during one of our first PM classes:
Applying for a PM job can mean a lot of different things. It’s important to know where you expect your PM to succeed now and where to grow in the future.
At the Boston Product breakfast, I learned that Pragmatic Marketing created a Framework that could also be used to guide the conversation.
At Pivotal Labs we ask PMs to fill out a chart where they rate themselves across a varied skill set that combines some of the items mentioned above, along with consulting, user research, and client enablement.
Your shared definition of skills should match your team needs. Once the skill set is understood, you want to discuss:
- Where is the PM right now?
- Where do you want them to get to?
[Step 2] Meet the team
This is probably pretty obvious, but deserves to be mentioned. And when I say team here, I don’t just mean developers, designers, and/or product. Lots of Boston PMs mentioned that new Product Managers sit in on sales meetings during their first week. Some new PMs work on customer support tickets. Even more valuable is talking to actual users — getting first hand experience immediately. Hearing from the user their real pain points.
I also want to call out the value of pairing other PMs. Not every team can support a pair period. But a 1-day to 1-week 2-PM pair period can be incredibly valuable. Maybe new PMs can even pair with different Product Managers in the company and get a sense of the varied styles.
[Step 3] Play around with the tools
Your new company probably uses new tools. Maybe you have a company wiki or you use a new project management tool. Whatever the tools are, you can use on-boarding as a time to familiarize a new PM with those tools. Use your tickets or scrum board to outline on-boarding tasks.
At Pivotal, we have a Pivotal Tracker project that includes all the Product Manager on-boarding tasks. It’s kind of brilliant. It makes adapting to Tracker really natural for your first project.
[Step 4] Collect Feedback + Reformat
One week into my on-boarding at Pivotal Labs, my manager organized an on-boarding Retro where I became responsible for the updating our on-boarding format. It keeps the on-boarding documents and tasks useful, relevant, and iterative.
[More Steps]
There were a bunch of other awesome things mentioned in these two conversations that I didn’t list here. Adam Sigel of Boston Product also sent around this article Ken Norton wrote about 12 things PMs can do to get on-boarded.
Let me know about other ideas that work well for your teams!
