A validated approach for up-skilling the Product Management Team — Designed for Leaders in Product Management
According to this research, organizations are grappling with an urgent need for new skills to support significant changes in business priorities and in how work gets done. Most respondents in this global survey say that skill building is the best way to close the skill gaps that have become even more visible in the Covid-19 pandemic. Skills development is even exceeding the importance of hiring, contracting, or redeploying employees. The same survey reported that sixty-nine percent of the respondents say that they have doubled down on skilling efforts since the pandemic began and are experiencing clear benefits. Up to 90 percent of participants say these efforts had a strong impact on their ability to realize company strategy, improve employee performance and satisfaction, and has improved their reputation as an employer.
Apparently, there is a clear need for personal and skill development. This is also what we have learned in the past 10 years, whilst collaborating closely with Product Leaders across various industries. Up-skilling and Re-skilling the Product Management team has become an imporant priority for Product Leaders, as Product Management has taken a critical role in the success of organizations. In this article, we share our insights and learnings from running Professional Development, Up-skilling, and Re-skilling programs in practice with multinational companies.
Implementing skill development programs is difficult to get right. It is hard to develop people and their skills in organizations. Everyone has a lot of work to do, priorities are changing fast, and it is hard to implement and achieve strategic company objectives successfully given all the pressure on running the business as usual. However, what we have learned is that there are nine key practices that help people and organizations to develop skills successfully. These practices are grouped into three phases of a skill development effort: 1) Assessing potential skills gaps, 2) developing a skills development strategy, and 3) learning delivery and outcome tracking. Let’s explore these steps in more detail.
Phase 1) Assessing Potential Skills Gaps
The first phase in a skills development effort is about identifying the existing skills gaps in the Product Management Team. This phase starts by identifying the desired skills of a product professional across different levels of role maturity. Existing company competences and skills, as well as role descriptions can be used to gather this input.
Alternatively, the Professional Product Management (PPM) Competency Framework and PPM Reference Model Career Framework can be used as a starting point, to be tailored to the organization’s specific context. When designing or customising these frameworks, the strategic ambition, digital agenda, and overall business model will be taken into account, in order to:
- Design a clear career framework and career pathways for the product management/ Product Owner team;
- Determine and tailor the required skills and competences across the career pathways and product management positions to the organization’s context;
- Conducting a Professional Product Management Competency Assessment, in order to identify the skills gaps for individuals and the product management team as a whole. A PPM Assessment measures the knowledge, skills, and competences of product professionals, allowing Product Leaders to develop a tailored up-skilling program. The key advantage is that learners no longer attend generic training courses, but focus on those skills that matter most for their personal — and their organization’s — future success.
Phase 2) Developing a Skills Development Strategy
The second phase is focused on designing those learning experiences and learning journeys that are required in order to close the (anticipated) skills gaps, as identified in phase one. Product Leaders need to identify what skills their team members need to develop first, what strategies are to be used for building those skills, what learning formats to use, how to design and deliver the learning journeys to their employees, and how to roll-out the required infrastructure and governance to support this learning.
Some product leaders may want to start with a clean slate and design and develop their own learning objectives, learning journeys, courses, course content, practices, and learning experiences. If you are one of those product leaders, you need to consider and get the following practices in place:
- You will need to design a portfolio of learning initiatives that enable you to close the skills gaps in the product management team;
- You will need to design tailored learning journeys and delivery plans for specific roles or groups of employees within the product management function;
- You will need to decide on the learning infrastructure and enablers for the learning journeys, such as online learning platforms, collaboration tooling, and others.
Most product leaders however, prefer to lean on professional training providers to help them in this major up-skilling or re-skilling initiative. At Xebia Academy for example, we have been developing product professionals across the globe for many years, and we have designed a portfolio of Product Management learning journeys that enable organizations to close their skills gaps. Using the insights in skills gaps from the PPM assessment and the future ambitions of the organization, we collaborate with our customers to select the right learning experiences.
The Professional Product Management training portfolio offers a wide range of different training modules, ranging from Stakeholder Management to Value Maximization, and from Envisioning & Storytelling to Product Strategy & Roadmaps. All modules cover the competences, knowledge, and skills to make professionals more successful. Each of these training modules spans across 8, 16 or 24 weeks, so that learners can apply new knowledge into practice right away. Each module offers a mix of learning styles, from self-study to classroom, and from individual exercises to group working sessions. Students will learn, apply, evaluate, and create knowledge and experience together, that matters to their daily work, and helps them to make an impact. Modules are hands-on, practical and focused on being effective and efficient in daily practice.
Phase 3) Learning Delivery & Outcome Tracking
The last phase involves the execution and delivery of the skill-building efforts that have been designed in the previous phase. Most product leaders start with a smaller group of front-runners in their product management team, before they start to scale the efforts across the product professionals in the organization. This experimental first phase often involves ensuring that the workforce is really building new skills and able to apply the newly acquired skills in practice. It is also to ensure that the organizational structures needed are in place for learning, and that there is a rigorous yet dynamic system for tracking the impact. The following practices form the final phase:
- Launching a “skilling hub” or other organizational structure that is dedicated to learning and development. This role may be performed by the product leaders themselves, but often require more structural support from a dedicated function/team (especially with a large group of product professionals);
- The up-skilling programs and learning journeys need to be delivered at scale across the organization via comprehensive capability-building programs that address the most critical skills needs. Experienced practitioners, industry-experts, and peer product leaders and managers are all part of these journeys to develop the skills and capabilities;
- The final, yet critical step to success, is to implement a dynamic tracking system to track skill development of the workforce, and to measure the impact of the learnings in practice.
At Xebia Academy, we have developed a clear and structured approach that embodies all the three phases of running successful learning & development initiatives. It is in this last stage that our trainers, consultants, and experts are at their best, in actually developing the skills and competences of learners and their organizations.
Summary
All the three phases and all nine practices are important to running a successful skills development program, like up-skilling or re-skilling the product management team. There are no shortcuts to take. When companies follow all nine practices, research shows that success is nearly guaranteed.
When a midsize European bank needed to reskill 3,000 tellers as relationship managers, the business first used a survey to assess skills gaps and segment employees. It then created and initiated tailored reskilling journeys, including a buddy program and new digital learning hub. The organization then sent regular surveys to gauge employee engagement and learning needs. Their comprehensive approach helped ensure a thoughtful, thorough, and ultimately successful reskilling program.
By Aaron De Smet, Angelika Reich, and Bill Schaninger in this article
Many organizations have reached a critical moment in time, which was fast-tracked perhaps in the past couple of years. Changes in talent development and skill building are needed to become future-fit and digital organizations. A holistic approach to skills development is required, and implementing the phases and nine practices listed in this article, you might just be on your way to future-fitness. Bon voyage!
Excited to move the profession of Product Management forward in your organization?
Becoming an expert in a field takes more than a single course. Consider it to be a journey, requiring knowledge gathering and experience in practice. That is why we have developed Product Management Learning Journeys for Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders.
We have found that people often want a structured approach to boost just those skills that they need to improve in a specific section. In order to enable that, we have set up various Professional Product Management Training Modules. Modules like Value Maximization, Envisioning & Storytelling, Strategy & Roadmapping, or Stakeholder Engagement & Politics provide you with 8+ week learning and development tracks, allowing you to really improve a specific area of competence, instead of going through a very generic course that covers all kinds of different topics on a high-abstraction level.
Want to get started? Take a moment to explore our website, learn more about our approach to Product Management, or schedule a chat about how we can help you, your team, or company to move the profession of product management forward.
