Product Manager onboarding

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

    • Product Areas of Ownership

    • R&D Org

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  • As you read the documentation, look out for any improvements that can be made (outdated information, spelling/grammar, etc)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

  • Product Management

  • GTM:PM Engagement (Stu Doherty, Jenn Lawler)

  • Sales Discussion (Lance Howden, Steve Green, Richard Pidgeon)

• Join and review the topics and posts in these channels to get a better understanding of our customers:

  • Customer Feedback

  • Customer Support

• Begin watching training videos on academy.mattermost.com

• Begin reading docs.mattermost.com

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 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

    • Mattermost Platform

• 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

• https://mattermost.com

• https://docs.mattermost.com

• https://developers.mattermost.com

• http://github.com/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

• Post detailed notes from customer calls in Salesforce

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

• 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

  • Take detailed notes and log in Salesforce

• Review feature requests

  • Process feedback in productboard

• Spend a week doing community support in the Mattermostforum

  • 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

  • Review videos on Mattermost Academy

• Technical Architecture (Feature Team dev lead)

  • Reference:

    • High level overview (slideshow summary)

    • High level system design document (more detailed)

    • Navigating the Mattermost database

• Product areas: Functional Overview and Roadmap

  • Reference:

    • PM Areas of Ownership

    • Roadmap - All teams

    • Engineering OKRs

• 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 structure

  • Product planning overview

• Team-specific processes (PM buddy)

  • Team Triage

  • Sprint Planning

  • OKRs

  • Join all feature team meetings (Triage, Sprint Planning)

• Design process (Feature team designer)

  • Spec template

    • 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 Testing assignment example

  • Release process (Amy, Release Manager)

    • Release process

    • Extended Support Release

• 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

• Example past project: Business Model Canvas

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).