Futuregood.
Creating digital leaders for tomorrow’s social change.
Vizzuality has a simple hypothesis. Connect designers, engineers, data scientists and social scientists with people who work tirelessly to improve the world and you’ll change the trajectory of the planet. We think we can turbo boost efforts to reduce the impact of climate change, stop the sixth mass extinction, and end social injustice with great online products when they are co-created by people who care.
As we move into the next decade of our work, it’s clear the level of complexity in building these pieces of work has gone up. Each project has more people, more data, more analysis, more design options, and more at stake. All this means that the building of social good online products requires a sophisticated level of coordination. And this is where the tireless Product Manager comes in.
We’ve noticed Product Managers (PMs) in Non-Profits are central to success (some call themselves Project Managers). Typically early in their career, these heroines and heroes are in constant motion. They coordinate data scientists, designers, programme officers, in-country stakeholders, partners from other organisations, private vendors and software engineers as well as their own managers and multiple user communities. It’s a hard job full of risks, difficult conversations, nerve-wracking launches, tedious project management software, and if all goes well, the euphoria of success. The better the PM, the better the project. The better the project, the greater the impact.
We’re also aware there are now more PMs in non-profits than ever before. With the opportunity to communicate with data across the web, many organisations are looking to take their messages online. The thing is, this role is not the same as a PM in a private company or government so when people ask us at Vizzuality to recommend training, mentoring and courses to help them become high performing product managers, we come up blank. There are simply no courses for PMs in non-profits.
After a number of years of hoping something would appear, it didn’t.
Rather than wait any longer, we decided to design our own training course. One that is specifically tailored to the needs of non-profit organisations and the unique challenges they face.
Recognising Vizzuality is a data design studio rather than a training agency, we called on our friends at Cambridge Executive Development for help. Feedback from people working for non-profit organisations helped shape the course content.
We spent months designing a course for early-career professionals engaged in digital product management for non-profits, and we’re delighted to announce a new course running in Washington D.C. in July 2018. Please, share it and if you like, sign up.
When we first imagined this, it was a simple course for product managers. However, after lots of discussions with our friends in social good organisations we realised that the motivation for this is bigger than that.
The societal need is bigger than one training course.
It only takes 10 minutes of watching our governments debate internet issues to know our leadership are woefully under-prepared. From elected government officials to early career professionals there are some missing skills.
We need a group of new leaders willing to build products in the pursuit of changing the trajectory of the planet. We need a community of leaders with a set of skills and qualities that surpass those working at the big tech companies. We need new learning opportunities that help these leaders flourish.
This is why we’ve started Futuregood.
Today it is one great workshop, pushing new product leaders towards their own brilliance. Tomorrow, well, we’ll see, but our aim is to find those talents and skills missing from our community and make them available.
I’ll save you from the marketing tricks of rarity and new shininess in favour of simply asking, do you wish to be part of this community? If you do, and want to be one of the first 12 people to attend the first course, then sign up today. (ok, I used a few tricks just there). If you know someone that might be interested, please share this blog with them.
If you have thoughts about what capabilities our community will need next, drop us a line or leave a comment below. We’d love to talk.
Maybe you can tell, but I’m pretty excited by this. As some person in Silicon Valley would say, this is a “force multiplier”. But I’d rather keep it simple and finish by saying, “this my friend, is important.” Join us.
Craig.
