Product Management Handbook
A white label product management handbook for government digital services created by Scott Colfer
View the Project on GitHub scottcolfer/product-management-handbook
Contents
Preface
What does product management mean within government?
- Product management is responsible for value
- We run things like mini-businesses
- We manage the value of public and staff services
- Origins of the role of Product Manager
- We have publicly available role descriptions
- The career pathway for product managers
- Tool: career pathway diagram
Associate Product Manager
- The Associate Product Manager role provides the core, tactical principles and skills of product management
- Work with agility
- Make use of the Scrum framework
- Make use of the Government Service Toolkit
Product Manager
- The Product Manager role develops the strategic principles and skills of product management
- Make use of the Lean Startup
- Simplicity - the art of maximising the amount of work not done - is essential
- Make promises to solve problems, not commitments to specific solutions and features
- People are our competitive advantage
- It’s OK to say ‘no’
Product Leadership
- Product leadership puts our product management skills to work at a larger scale by developing our business strategy and digital transformation skills
- A note on product leadership roles and career progression
- Keep being brilliant at the basics
- Develop expertise in business strategy and digital transformation
- Develop expertise in teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitation
- See the bigger picture
- Improve public services, one step at a time
- It’s still OK to say ‘no’
- Senior Product Manager can often be thought of as a group product manager
- Lead Product Manager can often be thought of as a ‘head’ of product for an area of the business
- Head of Product: have empathy, avoid dogmatism