How to Operationalize Digital Innovation through Proper Product Management

A step-by-step guide for building digital experiences that your users and stakeholders will love

Background

If you are like most aspiring product managers you probably found this article because you were “Googling” how to learn Product Management. You may even be a Product Manager who realized what you thought would work doesn’t. The good news is you are not alone. While some Product Managers are exceptional at what they do — most Product Managers really don’t know what they are doing.

Hi, my name is Adam Root. I’d like to teach you how to be an exceptional Product Manager for free.

To get started I would like to zoom out on how I arrived at the conclusion to create a Free Product Management Course. After co-founding a funded startup, working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, and leading Product Management efforts for public and private companies, I have learned the hard way how to build products users love.

When I was building my first product team I tried teaching new product managers what I had in my head, but it just didn’t work. Like most people that have been doing something for nearly two decades a lot of what I did was just “automatic.”

It would be similar to teaching someone how to drive after you have been driving for many years. When you were first learning to drive remember how many steps there were? Do you remember how much concentration you needed to apply the steps in the right order? If you have been driving awhile you probably drive while texting, drinking coffee, and checking your social media accounts. I hope you don’t, but most people do. Maybe after a long day you drove home and couldn’t remember how you even arrived. The point is when you first started driving versus now is a very different experience.

Like driving, I forgot to teach or even mention so many steps that are crucial for those who were just learning. Not because I didn’t want to, it was just “automatic” to me. As a result, teaching Product Management “on the job” just wasn’t working. Product Managers on my team became confused, overwhelmed, and frustrated. Products didn’t ship and stakeholders were not happy. I tried a new approach.

I scoured the web, completed courses, read books and had Product Managers on my team do the same. Sadly, I was once again frustrated by failure. Product Managers on my team were agitated.

Overwhelmed, I was starting to think that maybe I should abandon the people management career path and focus on being a Principal Product Manager.

Luckily I had several mentors encourage me. Fast forward a couple of years and eventually after a lot of trial an error and lot of patience from my team I was able to create a v1 of a Product Management training curriculum that finally seemed to garner results. Up until recently I hadn’t shared the course publicly. Not because I didn’t want to. I did. It was always one of those things I would do “someday.”

Zoom into today. In my current role it became necessary given resources and time constraints to scale and evolve what has been cobbled together in Confluence pages into a more formalized curriculum. I thought it best to share the course for free with all aspiring Product Managers on medium.

My hope is my Product Manager peers have some great ideas I missed or maybe better ways of doing things. If you are currently a product management team leader like a Group Product Manager or Director of Product Management at your company I’d love it if you can weigh in with approaches that have worked for you. Additionally, if you have been a Product Manager for awhile and have had some successful products shipped (with a title of Principal Product Manager or Sr. Product Manager) I would hope you will help aspiring Product Managers accelerate their learnings by adding your additions, deletions, or comments on the course. With that context let’s get started on this journey together.

Why Create Another Approach to Digital Innovation?

If you read the background section you have the context for why I created this course, but I liked to provide a little more data here. If you didn’t read the background section than I’ll summarize my findings with this statement more bluntly:

The US spends $250B per year on software development, with the average cost of development per project being $2.3MM for a large company, and $430K for a small company. 31% of applications were never completed, and 52% were nearly double the cost than anticipated. In fact,?only 16%?were completed on-time and on-budget. source: report by?The Standish Group

So if you are lucky enough to be in the minority of Product Managers that have built applications with?product/market fit, my assumption is that your product likely shipped later than expected, had excessive stakeholder compromises and cost more to ship than you originally anticipated- even if it did achieve the outcomes you set for the product.

So how do we fix this broken system? Customer Development, Design Thinking, Northstar, Jobs to Be Done, Circles, Lean etc? In my opinion, those frameworks and some others are excellent and they do provide some value. However, none of them are the “silver bullet” I hoped for and likely missing things you need too. Still, if you are aspiring to be a Product Manager I do think there is value in spending some time to learn the current thinking out in the market on some books and courses. The books, and courses I believe provide value and are worthing spending time on are below.

While all the above resources are beneficial (I do recommend you get them, and read them, or complete the courses if only to be familiar with what you will hear in your career) all of them by themselves fall short in preparing you for a career in Product Management. I strongly believe frameworks implemented in the past has caused a sea of dead startups, lost invested capital and/or shareholder value, and ethically questionable business practices. (e.g.?Facebook’s 21 scandals in 2018 alone.)

My goal in this course is to teach the necessary mindset, tactical execution, provide solutions to overcome common barriers you will encounter, team member roles you will work with, and stakeholder management practices you will need to ensure your product is built without compromising the integrity needed to gain market adoption. For sake of brevity I will refer to this approach in the rest of the series as?ADVANCE?.

ADVANCE? Program Overview

ADVANCE? is a Free Product Management Course intended to accelerate aspiring Product Managers with career ready digital innovation.

ADVANCE? is an acronym created as a mnemonic device to simplify remembering and communicating its complexity. The curriculum contains nine sections. Seven of the nine sections are the core curriculum and should be completed in sequential order. The course also includes two additional sections 1) Course Introduction, and 2) Capstone project.

Each of the seven core curriculum includes a lesson covering the theoretical knowledge of the material, a case study providing an example of material in the world, and an assignment to convert theory into practical skills.

For as long as I am able to, I will personally grade “officially registered students” assignments. To register for the official ADVANCE? Free Product Management Course complete the steps outlined in the Registration Steps section below. Once you complete the entire course, including passing all lessons and a Capstone Project you will either receive a certificate of completion (which can be shared on Linkedin) and/or a personal recommendation from me on LinkedIn.

Course Registration Steps

To officially “enroll” in this Free Product Management course, and be entitled to alumni benefits you will need to complete the following:

• Subscribe to my newsletter. Subscribing to Product Management Parchment will grant you access to apply to private (non-public) product manager jobs, access to exclusive networking events (in-person and online), and subscriber only material. To do so, Click the?Subscribe bell icon next to my profile photo.
• Connect on Linkedin. At time of publishing I have over 15,000 connections. LinkedIn limits connections for individuals to 25,000 connections. If I do not have connections available, “Follow Me” instead and send an Inmail.?My LinkedIn profile?is open which means you can send an Inmail to me for free. In your connection request, or Inmail state that you are “registering” for the Free Product Management course.
• Join the course Discord server?called Free Product Management Course. Joining the Discord server will enable you to ask other students questions on the lesson’s assignment, or ask me directly for help. Additionally, I post job opportunities to the Discord server before I send them in the my newsletter. Upon joining you will be assigned to a cohort channel. Each cohort lasts 90 days. If you do not graduate in 90 days, but are still actively learning, you can request to be added to a new cohort channel. Upon graduating the course you be added to the alumni channel. The alumni channel is a great networking opportunity if you are seeking a job in Product Management or looking to hire competent Product Managers.

If you do not to “officially” register for the course, I would still appreciate feedback, comments or critiques.?Please follow me on Twitter, and tag me in a tweet with the #FreeProductManagementCourse or send a Direct Message to me.

ADVANCE? (The Free Product Management Course) Syllabus

There are nine sections to the ADVANCE? Free Product Management Course.

1. Course Introduction: The first section of the course reviews several popular frameworks useful for digital innovation, a glossary of industry terms, the product development lifecycle and the composition of ADVANCE? Digital Product team. Exposing each team members area of responsibilities, experience level, average salaries, and career progression path.
2. Analyze the Market:?Products that achieve Product Market Fit start with a comprehensive market-based strategy. In this section, students will learn techniques to analyze markets and the frequency the team needs to complete market analysis. Once completed, students will be able understand the role Business Analysts, and Product Managers play at the beginning of the product development lifecycle and how to communicate early findings to stakeholders.
3. Determine Market Opportunities, and User Needs: The second lesson expands on the roles and deliverables needed early in the product development lifecycle. Including how these disciplines work with Product Managers to identify overlooked product opportunities hidden in a market analysis. Students will learn how to partner with these disciplines to generate artifacts such as personas, and user journeys to communicate user needs to stakeholders before pitching the product vision.
4. Vet the Market: Once user needs and market opportunities have been defined, the ADVANCE Product Team works together with the Finance team to forecast a product’s potential returns. Students will learn how to create a proforma using a technique called “Bottom Up TAM Sizing.” Afterwards you will learn how to highlight your findings from this lesson and previous lessons by completing a Market Requirement Document (MRD). This section will conclude by teaching you how to summarize the salient points of the MRD with your team and with stakeholders.
5. Assess Business Case:?Now that you and your team have a completed MRD you need to assess the business case for your market. You will learn about business models and how to determine the right prospective models using the Business Model Canvas. After completing a Business Model Canvas, students will learn how to identify the most profitable monetization strategy and refine the previous lesson’s proforma. After refining the proforma, you will learn how to compare it to in market solutions in Buy vs Build analysis. The lesson concludes by determining if the team should build a solution, buy an in market solution, or a buy a solution and extending its functionality. Students will learn how to evaluate ideas as a meritocracy, instead of rewarding the loudest voices. Creating an environment where the ideas most likely to succeed in market is developed by combining a free personality test and Zoom plugin called Dot Collector.
6. Narrow Hypothesis:?Armed with user needs, marco trends, competitive insights, business models, financial forecasts, and a decision to buy, build, or buy and extend functionality students will learn to how to write a Product Requirement Document, plan out feature releases in their roadmap, and summarize their findings in a “Product Hub” on Confluence.
7. Craft Product Vision and Pitch:?In this lesson, you will use all of previous knowledge you have gained to summarize a narrative for stakeholders in a Product Vision, and frame it in a way that is easy for stakeholders to quickly understand its value to the organization and to users by creating a simple presentation. Students will learn how to pitch their product vision with confidence, and overcome stakeholder objections without alienating relationship capital. Lastly, students will update their Product Hub with key information stakeholders and team members can refer back during the life of the product- ensuring its integrity remains in tact.
8. Empower your Team:?After pitching your product vision, and securing approval to build your product Product Managers need to equip the team with detailed information to ensure the team knows what they need to build. In this lesson, students will learn about Scrum and Kanban frameworks, and determine which framework is ideal for their product roadmap. In addition, students will learn how to write user stories, tasks, bugs, spikes, and chores, collectively called tasks. Assign and group tasks into epics in Jira, and roll these epics into an organization’s mission statement using Advanced Roadmaps in Jira. Lastly, students will learn how to ensure tasks are completed on time and budget by utilizing reporting features in Jira, and how program managers can manage this process throughout a product’s lifecycle.

Capstone Course: In the final assignment of the course, students will use everything they have learned to create a plan, collaborate with stakeholders Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, and the other teams to prepare them to interface with users as the product is launched. Execute the launch and use feedback from your customers to refine the Product Hub, and determine the next iteration for your product.

I look forward to seeing you in the forums, and I am excited to see what we build together! Onward.

PS:?If you are excited about what you will learn please like this article.