The lost art of Product Management

Karen and I were fortunate enough to attend the Product Management course by Flow Interactive last week. We have been wanting to attend this for over a year, so I’m glad to say it happened and to share some learnings from the course.

Debre and Phil (from Flow) were the two trainers, since Rian who created the course initially has moved to Oregon. They both have immense experience in Product Management and UX.

The aim was to explain the role of a Product Manager, and to give Product Managers a toolbox full of tools that they can use depending on where they are in their journey.

For me a big learning was the UX part. I never fully appreciated everything that falls under those two little letters. I also started to appreciate the big picture of the customer journey – instead of just their interaction with a website or app.

Some of the tools we were introduced to include:

• Business Model Canvas
• Interviews
• The 3A’s
• Impact Mapping
• Persona’s
• Customer Journey Maps
• Strategic Project Plans
• Story Maps

There must have been at least 15 more tools that I can’t recall right now. Two days of intensive training does that to my brain 🙂

On the second day I was surprised at how much time was spent on agile, and on Backlog Grooming in particular. I had no idea that this was such a big topic for Product Managers. The Backlog Grooming discussion was great, really emphasising the value of vision and understanding problems before coming up with solutions.

As a small business owner I learned some new tools that I will be applying to Growing Agile. As an agile coach I learned about all the little things that Product Managers struggle to juggle. I think this is a great course for Product Owners to attend.

One tip if you’re planning to attend: Take the day after the course off. Use this day to apply some of the learning to your work immediately. Before you get too busy and then forget the awesome tools!

Rian is nearly finished writing a book with much of the content of this course. If you are interested check out www.elezea.com. I am sure he will announce there when the book is available.