Training in the core, tactical principles and skills of product management

Associate Product Manager is where some of us start our career as a product manager, and where we learn the core, tactical principles and skills of product management. It can also be thought of as ‘Trainee Product Manager’ since it’s a role for us to learn ‘on the job’.

Associate Product Manager/Trainee Product Manager is where we learn how to take a large vision and medium-sized missions, and work with a team to create and prioritise small, achievavle goals. And to help a team break these goals into small, actionable jobs to be done. The Product Owner role within the Scrum framework describes the tactical product management skills required within a development team and as such provides a helpful model or Associate Product Managers to work from.

Associate Product Managers may start with a general awareness of product management tactics but are expected to develop rapidly, gaining working-level skills (i.e. can genuinely add value to a team) within six to twelve-months (ideally). The Associate Product Manager and the host organisation both need to commit to learning and development if this is rapid development is to be feasible.

Good conditions for rapid development of an Associate Product Manager include:

• association with a Product Manager or Senior Product Manager, ideally the person who owns the overall vision for the product/service on which the Associate Product Manager is working
• initially placement on a mature team, in the development phase (referred to as ‘Beta’ within government services); Associates initially placed in the exploration phase (inquiries, discoveries, or alphas) may find this tricky, since even mature teams find this phase tricky
• given the chance to rotate across teams on different product/services, for different users, in different phases of the product lifecycle (as their skills and confidence develops)
• provided with regular coaching and mentoring (ideally having a 1:1 every fortnight), and able to access training and development quickly and easily.

We need to view Associate Product Managers as a large investment of time and effort in order to build excellent Product Managers as the future (rather than viewing them as a cheap version of a Product Manager).

The GOV.UK role description for Associate Product Managers is great, clearly setting out expected skills, and the level of expertise required in each of these skills.