Product Manager onboarding
- Meet with direct manager
- Review your area of ownership and team members
- Get added to key organization and team meetings
- Get 1:1 set up for the next few weeks for frequent check-ins
- Review the onboarding plan for first 90 days
- HR Paperwork & Logistics
- Look at the product with “fresh eyes”
- Install Mattermost on your laptop, go through the steps of setting it up
- Optionally also install the Mattermost Mobile App on your mobile device
- As you read the documentation, look out for any improvements that can be made (outdated information, spelling/grammar, etc)
- Introduction to our Customer Obsession Principle
- Introductions to team members through 1-1s
- Use introductions as learning opportunities to understand different parts of the company (ask questions!)
- Introduction to product
- Introduction to key resources
- Introduction to key processes
- Post introduction to PM team to GTM teams. Request to join customer calls
- Get access to key tools (Jira, Github)
- Open your first pull request in Github for an improvement to docs.mattermost.com or in-product text.
Customer Obsession:
- Join and introduce yourself in these channels, ask to join any and all customer calls - see if you can get a couple scheduled this week:
- Join and review the topics and posts in these channels to get a better understanding of our customers:
Team:
- Join a location-specific channel (e.g.
Loc: CanadaorLoc: US) for region-specific updates - Meet your R&D team (Developers, Designer, QA, Technical Writer) and join team meetings
- Ask questions to understand development, design, QA processes, and documentation processes
- Meet with Amy (Release Manager) and read the release process doc
- Meet with Ian (CEO) [https://github.com/it33/readme/blob/master/README.md). This will be scheduled for you
- Meet other Product Managers (Jason Blais, Eric Sethna, Katie Wiersgalla, Ian Tao, Chen-I Lim, Neil Barnett, Winson Wun, Laney Coletti-Saracino, Don Hogan, John Lugtu, Sandy Atkinson)
- Learn about their areas of ownership
- Participate in PM, R&D, and Customer Obsession Meetings
- Jira
- Sign up to Jira and post in the “Jira configuration” channel to be added to internal team
- Get Jira training from PM buddy
- Make your first edit and pull request on GitHub
- Update documentation or product help text
- Make other small contributions based on your fresh experience with Mattermost
- File a bug in Jira
- Test a new feature on a test server and suggest an improvement in our UX feedback channel
- Leave feedback on a design proposal in our spec channel
Fresh perspective product review:
Before diving too deeply into docs, processes, and everything else - take this chance to share a list of questions, observations, and points of confusion to help with your own learning and to provide feedback on your first impressions of Mattermost for the rest of the team.
A good place to start is exploring the websites, and then start a cloud trial account.
- Users and customers
- Product
- Features/Functions
- Technical
- Market and Competitive Landscape
- Team
- People and Processes
- Document areas of improvement you see in your area of ownership or in team's processes. Share these with your manager.
- Update this onboarding document.
Learn about our customers and users
- Learn about Mattermost Support by getting an overview on support processes and systems
- Customers: Zendesk (Sven Huester, Support Lead))
- Community: GitHub, Forums (Amy Blais)
- Learn about Customer Success (Brent Fox)
- Overview of Customer Success team, who owns what
- Current Customer Success processes
- Typical challenges during customer onboarding
- Join one CSM team meeting to meet the rest of the CS team
- Join customer and prospective customer calls
- Join calls with CSMs & Sales team
- Review feature requests
- Review documentation first and work with Support Lead or PM mentor to answer any questions documentation does not address
- Update docs with answers as appropriate
Learn about the market
- Learn about Mattermost Sales (Regional VPs and Customer Engineers)
- Sales team overview
- Sales team priorities
- What competitors are we up against
- How does Sales team position the product
- What are typical challenges for the Sales team
- Which sales do we win, which do we lose
- What are the most common questions on configurations and trials
- Learn about Mattermost Marketing (Marketing Team Lead)
- Marketing team overview
- What are the Marketing team’s priorities
- What is our current messaging and positioning around Mattermost
- What is needed from Product Managers to support Marketing initiatives
- Do some mini competitive research analysis
- Review of MS Teams, Slack, Discord, and other collaboration products
Learn about the product
- Product Direction (Product Lead)
- Current Year Company goals and strategy
- Technical Architecture (Feature Team dev lead)
- Product areas: Functional Overview and Roadmap
- Reference:
- Product Analytics
- Tips on things to watch out for if running your own analytics
- Dive into product analytics (via Looker)
Learn about the product development process
- High level overview (PM buddy)
- Team-specific processes (PM buddy)
- Team Triage
- Sprint Planning
- OKRs
- Join all feature team meetings (Triage, Sprint Planning)
- Design process (Feature team designer)
- Competitor research
- User research
- Review process
- Spec review channel
- Working with contributor community (Jason Blais)
- Help wanted tickets
- Community buddies
- …?
- Release process
- QA process (QA team member)
- General QA process
- Sites for testing
- Release testing process
- Add to release testing
- Release process (Amy, Release Manager)
- Shadow feature team meetings and conversations
- Contribute where possible (reviewing research and design specs, filing Jira ticket bugs)
- Ramp up on a couple of ongoing projects or smaller projects
- Identify areas of improvement for your area of improvement.
- Other projects identified by PM mentor to assist in learning about your area of ownership
Update this onboarding document!
- Helpful links, FAQs, and summaries of what you learned that would be useful for a new PM to know in the future
- Participate in job duties and acquire ownership of a full feature (or more).
- Document detailed notes from customer calls for requirements and use cases.
- Kick off a project with the UX, Engineering and QA.
- Write spec document and release announcements for your feature.
- Participate in transitional projects with exiting PM owner
- Interview customers or users for research for an upcoming project
- Document research findings, use cases and requirements
- Work with UX team on specs for your project and validation of designs with customers
- Work with Development on specs and PR reviews for your project
- Work with QA on test plans
- Prepare customer facing documentation for your project
- Allow PM mentor to shadow you and review your work, providing guidance and feedback
- Other projects identified by PM mentor to assist in learning about your area of ownership
- Own all features within the release
- Update and maintain roadmap
- Work directly with developers, designers, and other stakeholders to progress projects
- Update and share roadmap with your direct manager.
- Respond to customers and internal stakeholders on questions relating to areas of your ownership.
- Prepare research and requirements for next upcoming projects.
- Prepare research and queue next projects
- Work independently with Feature team (Dev, UX, QA)
- Answer questions related to the projects you have been involved in and areas of ownership within the product (with support as needed from PM mentor).
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