Did you know????
This little ol’ blog has about 3,000 regular readers, of whom about 62% are in product management or product marketing. So, that means that there are about 1800 PMs and PMMs reading.
WHAT POWER! The Cranky Product Manager is DRUNK on her own INFLUENCE! ” My Gawd, I am just so WICKED fantastic,” the Cranky Product Manager says whenever she spies her image in reflective surfaces.
Anyway, being the new year, the Cranky Product Manager decided to stop being so ridiculously vain and — for a change — try to use her MASSIVE POWER for Good, and not for Evil or mere Crankiness.
What did she come up with? Here it is: collecting and disseminating UNBIASED* information and ratings of those vendors who target product managers and product marketers. You know, the type of information the Cranky PM wishes she had access to herself.
The first example was the Product Management Certification Survey.
Next up? A Survey on Product Management and Product Marketing TRAINING:
- Who offers the best product management and product marketing training?
- Was the training worth it?
- What did you get out of it?
- How much did you pay for your training?
- Which classes are the most worthwhile, given your career stage?
- Who are the best instructors
- You get the idea…..
The Cranky Product Manager will again run the survey and provide everyone the complete results as a free download, in a format where you can cross-tabulate answers.
Anyway, to conduct the survey, the Cranky Product Manager first needs a shortlist of firms to cover. Please nominate firms to cover in the survey in the comments.
And then, when the survey comes out in a week or two, TAKE IT!
Also, look for future surveys — once every month or two — covering things like PM recruiters/headhunters, conferences/events, software and online services for PMs, books, etc.
* No doubt, the vendors will try to taint the results of the surveys, but the Cranky Product Managers figure that even tainted information could benefit the product management community as a whole.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Cranky,
So you’re regularly going to survey a wide set of industry contacts and practitioners about topics that are relevant to them, and then write reports on the findings and publish them through your blog?
Sounds like you’re jockeying to become an industry analyst! :-)
Saeed
Cranky,
I think you missed on this one. With economic conditions about as stable as Britney Spears and the “holy-shit-the-sky-is-falling” reaction to it, getting product managers trained is soooo far down the priority list, it’s not worth discussing. You could argue spending money on training PMs will provide an ROI but with today’s economy, companies wouldn’t approve the soft-ROI of a training expense.
Unless of course you survey on non-corporate sponsored training. That would be another story.
Saeed, you must be joking. The Cranky Product Manager will just dump the results of the surveys – unfiltered – on this blog. No report. Who has time to write up reports when you’ve got 4 products to manage, a kid to raise, and a blog (or two, or three) to write?
Steve, you are no doubt right that corporate-sponsored PM training will generally be hard to come by given the current economic conditions. She thinks there’s value in capturing people’s impressions now – while they might have recently taken the training – to help others when we come out of this slump.
Further, the Cranky PM sees many self-pay training classes advertised these days. Most notably (as a Silicon Valley resident) she’s frequently notified about self-pay classes from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and ZigZag Marketing – all of which claim to improve the student’s chances in a tough job market.
Ya know, I’m getting really tired of everyone running for cover and quaking in their boots over the economy. Yes, it’s sucking pond water right now and that forces a lot of change, most of it very uncomfortable. I’ve felt it first hand. But it feels like everyone wants to use that as an excuse for inaction. Isn’t now a really good time for exactly the opposite? Seems to me that if everyone peeks out from their hiding places, maybe we can help shift the tide a little bit. So endeth my rant.
About a year ago I took the Pragmatic Marketing – Practical Product Management course which was really well done by Steve Johnson.
I’m actually interested in hearing any experiences with the UC Berkely one-week PM training course. Back when I was in Sillicon Valley, a coworker took a PM class-in-the-works from UCB Extension as the instructor was still working on drafts of the textbook. He would chat with me about what they’re covering, and it sounded like it might produce some really good material, considering how many Sillicon Valley PMs were attending and giving meaningful feedback. That was almost a decade ago – I’d be psyched to hear if the UCB stuff is actually good nowadays.
Hey John,
You may be tired of everyone running for cover in a recession. So am I. And perhaps you have a point that now’s a good time for exactly the opposite.
But. Show me a publicly traded technology company that doesn’t behave that way and I’ll apply. We live in a world where shareholders live by quarter-to-quarter P&Ls and if revenue is down, costs get cut. Yep, you could argue that it’s unwise to cut training but reality bites.
Hey Steve,
Point noted. I guess what I’m saying is that there are always alternatives. If training is that important to you, why not pay for it yourself? Maybe strike a deal with your company to smooth the expense out over a 12 month period? Or come up with an arrangement where they repay you when things improve? Worst case, maybe there is a way to write it off in your taxes. We all need to start thinking a little differently instead of immediately throwing in the towel.
Apologies to the CPM for thread-jacking and changing the subject, but living quarter-to-quarter is part of the systemic problem with the market. Companies cut people when the economy is rough and then bitch about how hard it is to hire top talent when the economy is booming. Unless you’re in a company that truly doesn’t believe it will survive the recession, now is the time to pick-up top talent. There’s a ton of people in the job market – not all are superstars but some definitely are – and it’s a “buyers market” if you will.
In my area of the country, there’s quite a few large privately held companies that seem to be retaining talent, and some are even hiring. At the same time, big publicly traded companies keep announcing 10% work force reductions as a pro forma gesture to the Street.
How many of these companies actually understand where that magic 10% number comes from? Or how stupid they look when they do multiple rounds of layoffs? I’m not an MBA, but I know that if you have to do multiple rounds of layoffs in the same quarter, you’re totally screwing up.
OK, back to the original topic of this thread. Every company I’ve worked at has a training/education budget. If it hasn’t already been axed from your company’s 2009 budget, submit a training request asap – it’s typically first come, first served. Even if your company has a fixed-cap reimbursement per employee policy, that doesn’t guarantee the money will be there if you wait until Q4. So, again, check if there’s a training budget and submit a request asap.
Of course, this assumes you have a legit need to attend training, that you’ll stay at the cheapest non-crack-den motel you can find, and you’ll show your punched Subway card to show you ate cheap as hell too. While legit training expenses will raise nary an eyebrow, submitting an expense report with $$$$ for travel, meals and lodging could be a career-limiting move ;)
I also agree with John that people should consider paying for their own training. It’s tax deductible and all but the most callous companies would let you attend training on your own $$ and do it on their time (eg without having to burn through your vacation days). Unfortunately, many of the training programs I’ve seen are priced with corporate pocketbooks in mind – they’re held at the best Hyatt in town with $250/night rooms instead of at the local Holiday Inn Express.
I’d suggest you take a look at Pivotal Product Management in your training survey. I’ve had a couple of training courses with them, have had them train my team and have hired them to help us launch our latest product (platrium.com). Pivotal PM can be found at http://www.pivotalpm.com/
I’ve used both pragmatic marketing for a rigorous approach to the art, and the silicon valley product group for a practical approach to the art. They’re different, and both good. SVPG is at http://www.svpg.com/index.html.
I also used the Seattle area Pivotal PM. My marketing director put me in touch with them and I took both their PM Intensive and Requirements Writing workshops. The classes were invaluable to me because at the time I had just been promoted from being a marketing peon to a PM, and I did not what a PM did until I read the job description I was given. The classes really helped me figure out my position and tackle the planning documents I was responsible for. Each class was $1600 and my company kindly picked up the tab. http://pivotalpm.com/
I’m another supporter of Pivotal Product Management. I took their Product Management Intensive PM/PMM course last spring to ensure my skills were up to date and prepare for the AIPMM exams. The course proved to be a rigorous and comprehensive study of Product Management and Marketing practices. Following the course, I took and passed both PM and PMM exams so I feel that the course fee was well worth the expense. http://www.pivotalpm.com/
Paco and all,
Just wanted to clarify, UC Berkeley Extension and UC Berkeley Executive Education are different. The one week course at UC Berkeley Executive Education has been around since 2006 so it is different than the one you refer to. I won’t comment since I helped organize it, but I’d love to have it included in the survey: http://www.galimagroup.com/product-management.
Also, on the economy / training, we have 35 people signed up for an April 27-May 1, 2009 one week Product Management program. This time last year it would have been sold out with 70 participants. Just some data if anyone is curious.