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    • As you read the documentation, look out for any improvements that can be made (outdated information, spelling/grammar, etc)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

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
  • 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.

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
  • 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

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)
    • Spec template
      • Competitor research
      • User research
    • Review process
      • Spec review channel
  • Working with contributor community (Jason Blais)
    • Help wanted tickets
    • Community buddies
    • …?
  • Release process
  • 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).