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On this page
  • First day
  • Objective: Get a good idea of what your first few weeks and months at Mattermost will be.
  • Activities
  • First week
  • Objective: Get an introduction to product, customers, team members, resources, and processes
  • Training focus
  • Training outcomes
  • Activities
  • First 30 days
  • Objective: Build your foundational knowledge of our company, product, and market.
  • Training focus
  • Training outputs
  • Activities
  • First 60 days
  • Objective: Build confidence through contribution in your area ownership
  • Training focus
  • Training outputs
  • Activities
  • First 90 days
  • Objective: Take full ownership of responsibilities
  • Training focus
  • Training outputs
  • Activities

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  1. Operations
  2. Research and Development
  3. Product
  4. Product Management team handbook

Product Manager onboarding

PreviousProduct Management Areas of OwnershipNextProduct Manager levels

Last updated 2 years ago

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First day

Objective: Get a good idea of what your first few weeks and months at Mattermost will be.

Activities

  • 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    • As you read the documentation, look out for any improvements that can be made (outdated information, spelling/grammar, etc)

First week

Objective: Get an introduction to product, customers, team members, resources, and processes

Training focus

  • 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

Training outcomes

  • 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.

Activities

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: Canada or Loc: 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 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.

  • Google Mattermost

First 30 days

Objective: Build your foundational knowledge of our company, product, and market.

Training focus

  • Users and customers

  • Product

    • Features/Functions

    • Technical

  • Market and Competitive Landscape

  • Team

    • People and Processes

Training outputs

  • 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.

Activities

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)

    • Reference:

  • 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

First 60 days

Objective: Build confidence through contribution in your area ownership

Training focus

  • Participate in job duties and acquire ownership of a full feature (or more).

Training outputs

  • 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.

Activities

  • 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

First 90 days

Objective: Take full ownership of responsibilities

Training focus

  • Own all features within the release

  • Update and maintain roadmap

  • Work directly with developers, designers, and other stakeholders to progress projects

Training outputs

  • 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.

Activities

  • 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).

(Stu Doherty, Jenn Lawler)

(Lance Howden, Steve Green, Richard Pidgeon)

Begin watching training videos on

Begin reading

Meet with Ian (CEO) [). This will be scheduled for you

Post detailed notes from customer calls in

Answer at least one question during the week of community support in the Mattermost

Take detailed notes and log in

Spend a week doing community support in the Mattermost

Review videos on

Example past project:

Product Areas of Ownership
R&D Org
Product Management
GTM:PM Engagement
Sales Discussion
Customer Feedback
Customer Support
academy.mattermost.com
docs.mattermost.com
https://github.com/it33/readme/blob/master/README.md
Mattermost Platform
https://mattermost.com
https://docs.mattermost.com
https://developers.mattermost.com
http://github.com/mattermost
Salesforce
forum
Salesforce
Process feedback in productboard
forum
Mattermost Academy
High level overview (slideshow summary)
High level system design document (more detailed)
Navigating the Mattermost database
PM Areas of Ownership
Roadmap - All teams
Engineering OKRs
Team structure
Product planning overview
Spec template
Release Testing assignment example
Release process
Extended Support Release
Business Model Canvas