Product Management Training…

Nobody that I know of has gone to college to be a product manager.  Believe it or not there STILL aren’t any courses in college that are designed to help business and technology professionals-to-be understand the nuances of managing ideas and turning them into profitable products.  (I wonder why; but that is another topic for another day.)  So we product manager understand our trade and perfect our skills through on the job experience and sharing those experiences with others.  While this is all good…it is nice to have formal training that you can buy and feel like we now understand product management.

I have been around long enough to have been trained in Pragmatic Marketing by Craig Stull himself and repeated the training at different companies enjoying the knowledge offered by the trainers that Craig has hired to succeed him and scale the Pragmatic Training organization.   There are other training programs available as well, such as those offered by ZIGZAG Marketing.

I particularly enjoy hiring product managers from other companies so that I can collect some of the best thinking and benefit from the experiments run by other companies within my product management group.

In the end, you know who really needs the product management training?  The people who aren’t product managers.  No, really.  Hear me out.  If you are a college graduate in business or technology, you still had to take some accounting classes or some ridiculous philosophy classes.  At the time, you probably thought to yourself, “Interesting, but what does this have to do with what I want to do for a living? I’ll never use this stuff again.”  But the truth is, having those classes gave you enough of a background in accounting or finance or social work or whatever that you don’t question those people in your organization.  You trust that the accountants are doing double entry accounting and paying the bills properly. 

But since nobody has any background or understanding of product management, they question it all the time, “What exactly do you do?”  Other people, even CEOs and executives wonder what value product management brings to an organization because they just don’t understand.  I would love to see some sort of training done for the non-product manager types to help them understand the context for product management.