Product Manager onboarding
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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As you read the documentation, look out for any improvements that can be made (outdated information, spelling/grammar, etc)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: 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
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)
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
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).
(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: