2022 Year In Review

Essay originally published on the Product Teacher blog on December 19, 2022.

The profession of product management has continued to evolve significantly over the past few years. At Product Teacher, we’re honored and humbled to be a part of that evolution.

While 2022 was a turbulent year worldwide, we must continue to press on and create positive value in the spaces around us. As this year draws to a close, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate the accomplishments and milestones that we achieved together in 2022.

Our core achievements in 2022

We measure our success across three distinct vectors:

• Enabling individuals to succeed in product management
• Empowering organizations to build better products
• Giving back to society

Here’s how we did on each vector this year.

Empowering individuals

In 2022, we directly served more than 1,000 customers through our products and services. On top of that, our PM essays and free resources reached hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of countries this year.

Self-serve products: We expanded our product offerings to enable people to succeed in product management from end to end. We now cover PM recruiting, PM onboarding, and PM upskilling & promotions.

Here are our on-demand video courses:

• (Recruiting) Building a Winning PM Resume
• (Recruiting) Solving the PM Interview
• (Onboarding) Succeeding as an Associate PM
• (Upskilling & promotions) Monthly PM Masterclasses

These products validate our thesis on the value of pairing high quality with scalability. By capturing our knowledge into on-demand videos and exercises, we provide high-quality resources at affordable price points. Even better, our clients can flexibly leverage these courses at any time, in any location, without having to deal with overflowing calendars or inconvenient time zones.

This trend maps well with what we’ve seen from other leading product management educators. As an example, Product Talk (product discovery education) identified that live group coaching doesn’t scale well beyond 30 client groups each year.

Our self-serve products are our core value generator. They’ve enabled us to help more than a thousand customers — an impossible feat if we solely offered live career services. By relentlessly focusing on these products, we’ve been able to ship career-changing impact at scale.

Career services: While our focus is on our self-serve video courses, we understand that a subset of our customers have targeted questions or urgent situations that require immediate, live guidance.

That’s why this year, we rounded out our career services to help individuals tackle the immediate problem at hand. Here are some of our services:

• Personalized resume review
• Personalized cover letter review
• Personalized LinkedIn profile review
• Mock interview
• Product spec review
• Career coaching & executive coaching

We provided over 300 hours of career services in 2022. We’re humbled that these services have helped people secure new opportunities, ranging from entry-level PM to VP of Product, and ranging from early-stage startups to FAANG companies.

Free resources: As a business, we have to earn profits so that we can pay the bills, take care of loved ones, and sustainably ship positive impact in the long run. Even so, we’re always looking to share as much high-quality knowledge as possible, as affordably as possible.

That’s why we continue to build on our library of free product management resources, so that anyone can succeed in product management irrespective of their current financial situation.

This year, we launched a free microdegree on ecosystem integrations. We’ve also shipped free one-page guides covering coffee chats and PM interviews.

On top of that, we’ve written 60+ PM essays on our blog. And, our award-winning newsletter provides free PM knowledge every week to 2,000+ dedicated professionals. Our PM jobs board has featured dozens of open PM roles this year, enabling people to find their new jobs for free.

Serving organizations

Product Teacher was initially founded with a focus on enabling individuals to excel in product. While that continues to be our core motivation, we’ve found that serving organizations is an excellent way to build on our mission and help even more people in product management.

That’s why this year, we expanded our sights to help not just individuals succeed in product management, but to also empower organizations to ship better products and processes.

In 2022, we provided more than 100 hours of live group instruction to organizations. These organizations include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, and student groups.

We now have broad coverage of key topics in product management, such as:

• Hard skills: Product Vision and Product Strategy, Creating Product Roadmaps, Crafting Product Specs, Analytics for Product Managers, Integrations for Product Managers, User Empathy and Product Adoption, Using Pilots to Drive Results
• Soft skills: Stakeholder Management, Effective Communications and Meetings, Managing Uncertainty, Design Thinking
• Org change: Transitioning to Modern Product Teams, New PM Onboarding

Our corporate clients include fast-growing startups (e.g. Happy Money), innovative product agencies (e.g. Convergence.Tech), and global brand names in tech, finance, real estate, and energy.

We also serve student groups from 4 out of the top 10 MBA programs in the US, including the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; participants have used our workshops to successfully secure PM job offers and level up as Sr. Product Managers.

We’re committed to expanding our extensive library of topic coverage so that we can empower your group to succeed. Reach out to workshops@productteacher.com to learn more about our group workshops; we’d love to design targeted curricula and programs for your needs.

Contributing to society through CSR

Product Teacher is proud to be a thoughtful and responsible global citizen.

Through our Diversity in Product spotlights, we’ve amplified the voices and perspectives of more than a dozen talented individuals in product management from underrepresented backgrounds. We continue to advocate for LGBTQIA+, non-binary, women, and BIPOC perspectives, as well as perspectives from “non-traditional” paths into product management.

An inclusive environment for PMs means more inclusive products, and more inclusive products create deeper value for users, customers, and businesses. By widening the lens of product management, we’re committed to pushing for inclusivity in whatever way we can.

Furthermore, we believe that corporate philanthropy is a worthy endeavor. To that end, we’ve donated thousands of dollars this year through DonationMatch. We actively fund initiatives that are focused on financial equality, female empowerment, queer empowerment, youth education, neurodiversity, mental health, and elder care.

This year also saw us break new ground in partnering alongside career-oriented nonprofits. We’re working hand-in-hand with the Blacks In Technology Foundation to provide hundreds of licenses of our PM resume course to Black professionals.

Additionally, we recognize that the world is full of excellent product management communities and philanthropically-aligned organizations, which is why we’re deeply grateful to have the opportunity to donate our products and our expertise to the 2Hearts community, the ADPList community, and the Centre of Effective Altruism. We have also committed to Pledge 1% and to the Giving What We Can Pledge to provide financial support to high-impact causes.

And, we understand that businesses cannot survive if the planet becomes unfit for human life. Climate change is real, and we want to do more than our fair share. We have taken the SME Climate Commitment as part of the United Nations Race to Zero campaign. We are carbon-negative this year and plan to stay carbon-negative as long as we are in business. We are financial supporters of The Carbon Almanac volunteer initiative to share knowledge and promote climate action. And, we are water-usage negative and plan to stay water-usage negative as long as we are in business; this matters to us as we’re based in California, which regularly experiences droughts and water shortages.

Last but not least, we’re committed to strengthening the product management student community. Some of the student groups that we actively sponsor:

• Booth Product Management Club (University of Chicago, Booth School of Business)
• Berkeley ABA (University of California, Berkeley)
• Optimir (University of California, Berkeley)
• Texas Convergent (University of Texas, Austin)
• Pivot Case Competition (Simon Fraser University, Beedie School of Business)

If you run a student group in product management, tech, business, or minority empowerment and are interested in sponsorship, please reach out at admin@productteacher.com.

Other notable achievements in 2022

Outside of our key focus areas, we also wanted to express our gratitude and shine a spotlight on the recognition and awards that we received from others this year.

Recognition and awards

We received multiple high-visibility awards this year for our leadership in product management, and we’re humbled to be recognized for our work.

This year, we were recognized as Ones to Watch in PLG 2022 by Gainsight and the Product-Led Alliance. This award recognizes, showcases, and celebrates the product-led community, including established experts and up-and-comers stepping into the spotlight.

We also received the Product 50 Award, awarded by Amplitude, VentureBeat, and G2, for providing high-quality product management knowledge to the community. Product 50 celebrates the product innovators and the visionaries who are pioneering digital-first products, transforming age-old companies into it-players, and advising the most successful teams through the product development process.

Furthermore, we were recognized as a Top PM Career Coach in 2022 by Outpace, OnDeck, Reforge, Products by Women, and Lenny Rachitsky. This award spotlights coaches who have dedicated themselves to upleveling leaders in tech worldwide. The winners of this award include household names in product management coaching like Ken Norton.

Additionally, we were recognized by Mogul as one of the Top 100 Companies with the Best DEIB Initiatives in 2022. The panel at Mogul identified us as one of the top performers in implementing best practices in DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging); investing in resources and tools; and enabling diverse leaders to be placed in high-growth, compassionate organizations.

Spotlights and features

Product Teacher continues to demonstrate thought leadership in product management. We’re honored to have been featured in speaker events, conferences, guest lectures, podcasts, and written interviews.

Live speaking: We served as a guest lecturer for York University’s Certificate in Product Management. We also served as a keynote speaker for a large financial technology company, where we educated 5,000+ PM attendees on customer-centric product adoption techniques.

Additionally, we served as a guest speaker for these organizations and more: European Product Conference 2022, University of Toronto, Indian Institute of Management Visakhapatnam, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Management Development Institute Gurgaon, Ladder Life, YourMauka, MentorMesh.

Podcasts: We shared our product management knowledge on a variety of shows and podcasts. You can hear our insights on Journey with Lei, Inspired in Berlin, NoCode Wealth, Passion for Product, epekworks, SaaS Backstage, and Product Soch.

Written interviews: We’re humbled to have been interviewed by Amplitude, EMHub, J-CAST, Olvy, Producter, Smartlook, Mentors Collective, and Hide Shidara. We take the responsibility of product management education seriously, and we’re endlessly grateful to have the opportunity to share as much insight as we can.

Our plans for next year

Product Teacher was built by product managers for product managers — so it’s only natural that we have in place!

We will continue to invest in our three core segments of students, professionals, and product organizations. A couple of highlights that we’re particularly excited about for next year:

• For students, we plan on spinning up an “Intro to PM” course to help them decide whether product management is right for them or not
• For professionals, we’re excited to ship a new on-demand course focused on Product Strategy, where we plan to cover fundamental principles, real-world examples, and self-paced exercises

We’re also excited to be working alongside the Berkeley Career Center and with professors from Stanford to share PM knowledge with students, alumni, and professionals.

How you can help

Our mission is to make product management easier for everyone, but we can’t do it alone! If our work resonates with you, we’d love to have your support.

The best way to help us is through word of mouth. If any of our essays, resources, products, or services have been helpful to you, we’d love for you to share them with friends and colleagues.

And, if you’re open to providing a testimonial with us, please reach out to us at admin@productteacher.com , we’d love to hear from you!

Outside of the above, many product people have found that engaging with product content on social media is a great way to catch the attention of prospective employers or prospective new hires. We’d love to see your reaction posts on our essays through social media, whether that’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or any other platform you prefer.

Another great way to help us “make product management easier for everyone” is to bring us into the organizations that you’re a part of:

• For students: let us know if there’s an event that we can provide for your student group
• For product managers: we’d be more than happy to share our on-the-job experiences with your pod, your guild, or your department
• For product leaders: we’d love to have the opportunity to upskill your PM talent

For 2023, we’d love to strengthen the nonprofit sector. We’d love for you to refer us to nonprofits to work with, whether to provide live training or to donate resources.

And as always, please send your pain points, your ideas, and your feature requests to admin@productteacher.com — after all, we’re in business to build for our community, and we can’t do that without your voice!

Closing thoughts

We’re endlessly grateful to have the opportunity to serve the product management community. Our mission continues to be “making product management easier for everyone.”

Thank you for all of your support. We truly could not have reached these milestones without you. We’re deeply excited for the progress that we’ll make in 2023 together!