Achieving Product Management Excellence in challenging startup atmosphere

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson (Dalai Lama)

I always strive for product management excellence, and also for being productive. I hate to do same mistake twice and try to learn from everything I do. Or as the Dalai Lama said once: When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

In my journey to infuse learning, innovation and product management I bumped into company that really helped me to translate my vision of becoming a learning product organization, into reality.

With Shamaym I implemented a unique debrief-based learning model, to bridge team’s gap of learn and improve from the daily work. The model is based on the Israeli Air Force debriefing methodology.

Shamaym helped me to structure a robust learning culture with 3 tips:

#1 Implement a self learning model

Personal responsibility for actions, mistakes AND learning.

#2 Culture of learning

It’s ok to to make a mistake, as long as everyone can learn from it, and by that turning mistakes into learning opportunities for all. Structure learning forums and you’ll see how people strive for learning from each other and are very supportive.

#3 Learning routine

Incorporate debrief-based learning routine into daily work, make it a second habit to debrief (good and bad), and not only when something (usually bad) happens.

I used it a lot in many aspects of product management life cycle, starting from customer meetings debrief, sprint retrospectives debriefs, demo meetings debriefs, roadmap meeting debriefs and so on. It helped to spread the knowledge across team members (R&D, product, marketing). The discussions made around failures contribute to the culture and also get out of the box ideas, that you alone, even if you learn from mistakes, couldn’t think about.

Keep learning, feel free to contact me, look for me on LinkedIn for more information about it!

Dror Jacoby

(Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash)

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