Product 1

Product Management

Here is a post I made for Reddit some time ago giving an insight into where I am with Product Management.

3-month update in my first PM role

Edit; thank you kind stranger very much appreciated

Hello All and sorry about the long post,

I just thought it might be good to provide a 3-month update since I started a new job as a Product Manager with no previous experience.

The first week was finding my feet within this new position and confirming the priorities for the first 6months to 1 year.

Once this felt settled I spent more time than I really needed, to talk with the Director of the software team, disusing issues with the product, age of some of the products / code-base, problems with the development process and of course an initial chat about where the initial product would fit.

After multiple discussions with C-level, sales and the entire S/W team I have now got a reasonable level of re-occurring meetings to keep everything in a nice loop.

My first biggest task was to get Jira implemented as a tool to help facilitate an Agile workflow.

The Jira implementation has gone well, workflow isn't 100% yet but working well enough that I have by-in from all the S/W team (+C-level) excluding 1 developer, I'm sure in time this will improve.

I do not think we are working to an agile mindset yet, but its much better than we had previously, Trying to arrange some PO training courses to go on since all i know about Agile is what I have read so far :)

Implemented a proper feature request Process (all documented in Confluence) slowly turning this into the documentation Hub.

the NFR system is working well and it has enabled me to work closely with support and now joining their weekly meetings to keep abreast of any on-going issues, to help close the link from support to Dev and to learn about customers and what they are using our products for.

(This is also getting me lots of nice data which I am still trying to refine to help identify what each product is used for and what sort of industry, company etc the customers are).

Most recently I have now stated a faux "start of sprint" review with each product range so everyone has a better idea of the most important tasks for the week after the higher-level backlog review.

Everyone is very aware that this entire Agile process is iterative and knows that we are fully open to constructive criticism and opinions on how to improve this is working since every week I am having few and fewer comments and less and less changes are being made.

Most of what has been achieved so far feels like administration work not so much PM work.

Since most of the above is now mostly automated and taking ~<2 days of my time her are my goals for the next 3 months;

1, Release a new (replacement) product due to concerns about vulnerability on code-base (library used).

2, Start having in-dept discussions with some key customers.

3, Work through the pragmatic institute framework and attempt to Map this to customers/products so I can start thinking like a PM not just what seems to feel right for the current situation.

4, Attend a PM Training Course

5, Work with the QA team to help implement a better QA process for S/W

1. Start a product requirement specification for future development project

7, Attend in-person trade shows (if travel is possible)