Frequently Asked Questions

Many roles today, particularly in product management, require skills that are not taught in schools. Almost every day, we hear of teams that have never had formal training and the chaos that results from a lack of common language, methods, and understanding of roles.

Most importantly, executives must consider the cost of continuing to create and maintain products (and teams) that are underperforming. How many on the product teams have not been trained in basic product management or product marketing?

Moreover, many firms are challenged with retaining existing product managers and upskilling newly hired ones. Many teams are finding strong talent in other roles in the company, such as engineering, support, or sales engineering, but realize those new hires will require training to make them effective. 

To help you get started, take the free Product Team Self-Assessment.

It is critical to get executives on-board with product management which is why an executive briefing is included with each Product Growth Leaders course.

But what exactly does “getting on board” mean? For some teams, the executives need to understand the strategic role of product management—gathering and prioritizing market insights into new business opportunities. For others, it’s getting clarity on the different product team roles—especially the differences between product manager, product marketing manager, product owner, and project manager. And some need to understand the importance of a consistent and repeatable way of defining, developing, and delivering products to market.

Product management brings professionalism, standardization, and visibility to the business of products.

See our ebook on the Business Role of Product Management.

Titles are chaotic. What one company calls a product manager, another calls a product owner. And another calls a product marketing manager. Defining product roles is a challenge for most organizations — only 21% of organizations have clear definitions of roles. 

Product Growth Leaders offers a roles and responsibilities workshop to help teams assess their titles and remove the chaos with clearly defined roles and responsibilities—specifically in product management, product marketing, development, and marketing. 

At Product Growth Leaders, we use the Quartz Open Framework in our courseware and include Quartz certification with all of our standard courses.

The Quartz Open Framework is the only open-source product management framework for technology teams. Quartz reveals the scope of product management activities and connections to other methods such as sales, marketing, and development frameworks.

The Quartz Open Framework was created by leveraging the experience of dozens of product professionals and industry thought-leaders. The framework focuses on enabling teams to achieve business results through practical tools and a common language.

Quartz is FREE to use, OPEN with a Creative Commons License, and EASY to deploy in any organization.

For many teams, product management is chaos. But why? Is it a lack of clarity on roles? Or is it an absence of a coherent process? 

We offer a number of team assessments, examining your team’s skillsets, processes, and the gaps between importance and execution of key product deliverables. A team assessment can help you find the most important area for your focus—to remove chaos and bring a systematic approach to defining and delivering products. 

On-demand courseware is ideal for international teams. With pre-recorded sessions, participants can learn the concepts in their local time zones yet still collaborate with other team members via our learning portal. At their option, we can also offer closed captions (in English) for those who do not have English as a primary language. 

Pragmatic Institute (formerly Pragmatic Marketing) delivers classes in product management, marketing, design, and data science. Their classes are considered some of the best in the industry.

Product Growth Leaders was founded by two former Pragmatic instructors with a singular focus on product management, particularly the business and strategy role of product managers. Our approach integrates education with application, using a highly engaging instructional method we call L-E-A-P.

Our courses and workshops can be conducted onsite as well as online. Each approach has its merits.

With online courses, participants learn, apply, and review concepts one lesson a week with an agenda that fits into a busy product professional's schedule. 

Onsite courses can be great team-building sessions with a "bootcamp," learn-it-quickly format in a two- or three-day session. 

Regardless of format, we combine lessons with application to ensure learning outcomes.

Fundamentals of Managing Products ensures a strong foundation for the technical aspects of product management from idea to requirements to working with technical teams.

• Discover market problems

• Define your product vision

• Define markets, segments, personas

• Roadmap your plan

• Write problem stories

• Plan release and launch

Principles of Product Strategy emphasizes strategic planning and product financials. Your team will learn to manage the business of the product through its lifecycle.

• Analyze the market and competition

• Assess your product performance

• Evaluate product strategy options

• Validate in the market

• Create the business case

• Communicate the portfolio strategy

Product Growth Accelerator re-orients product marketing around buyers and how they buy, anticipating the needs of their customer-facing teams, and ensuring that marketing and sales teams are equipped to guide the buyer to successful adoption of the solution.

• Redefine product marketing as a strategic role

• Understand the connections between product marketing and other departments

• Identify and resolve friction in the buying process

• Focus on buyers and their journeys

• Instrument the buyer journey to empower salespeople

• Emphasize strategies that guide rather than campaign tactics to copy

Click the course name to see more details.

Titles are inconsistent from company to company or organization to organization. Our courses are designed for product professionals who manage aspects of product—from strategy to planning to growth.

Public: experience the class (scout) to see if it's right as a private for your team; for small teams

Private: team building, openly discuss your products, your examples

PRIVATE COURSES

It’s amazing how rarely product teams in the same organization are in the same room. Sure, product teams often come together to help plan a customer or marketing event, or for large team development planning. But how often do they have the chance to talk about product marketing and management?

How often do they discuss:

• How do you do it?

• How we do it here?

• How could we improve?

For most teams, the answer is never.

Offerings from Product Growth Leaders are designed for product teams. Our private courses help your team learn new techniques, yes, but we also encourage discussions on how those techniques will work in your environment. And to share your work with others who deeply understand your company and industry and domain.

“As we went through the lessons, it was extremely valuable to have the time to talk about how the concepts apply at our company. We not only learned great techniques from our instructor, we learned from each other.”

PUBLIC COURSES

But what if you’re not a member of a team? You’re the only product manager. Or one of two? That’s why we offer public courses as well as private courses.

Public courses from Product Growth Leaders follow the same LEAP (Learn, Extend, Apply, Peer Review) approach as our private courses. They are a great way to train one or two people.

The public courses are also great for “scouts.” Maybe you want to train a dozen or so product professionals but you’re not sure. Send one or two to our public classes to see LEAP in action. To determine if this approach is right for your team.

And if you like our approach—and we think you will—you can apply your purchase to a private course for your extended team. [Some restrictions apply.]

Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed of public courses.

Each course remains online for one year from the first lesson and paid participants can re-watch the videos as many times as they’d like.