FAQs

    • Hustle Club - Designed to help people find groups of people to mock with at roughly the same level. As a coach, I support your groups with materials and try to run 8-week programs preparing people for product design. But the groups are fluid, so I have to be flexible. I do NOT coordinate the pairing up of candidates. You can do that on your own or add your name to the waitlist and BPM volunteers try to match people every two weeks.

    • What if I can’t wait two weeks? Put together your own group or try to join one of the active groups. It is called a Hustle Club for a reason. Put your PM skills to work and hustle to reach out to find others you can work with.

    • Squarespace - We have hacked Squarespace to make it a flexible Learning Management System. We tried other systems (Thinkific, Kajabi, Teachable, Teachery, etc.) but they make it difficult to add content weekly, share links or easily just jump to the content you need when you want it. So, I created a series of pages and blogs that allow for easy access to materials in the order you need them without having to page through everything. And most importantly, I can add new content and just share a link and it works.

    • How important is the welcome page? As a courtesy to me and ALL the BPM members leveraging my coaching support, please watch the welcome videos before asking process and format questions in a mock interview group. I give a quick overview of the biggest players, question types and plans. Asking me to repeat it in sessions isn’t fair to others in the group.

    • Substack - The newsletter format serves four key purposes: easy updates, paced studying, flexibility for latecomers, and relative security.

    • Easy Updates: Each week, I can summarize the new recordings, FAQs, and share the results of group coaching exercises.

    • Paced Study: A lot of candidates find self-paced exercises difficult. They like being told what to focus on each week.

    • Flexibility for Latecomers: People who join groups late or miss emails, can look up old emails to get up to speed or find something they miss.

    • Relative Security: While not perfect, using the invite-only Substack lets us control who has access. If the world can get at BPM materials, it takes away from the edge we are trying to give you all. Right now, invite-only requires manual additions from me. I try to add new members just before I send new emails every Sunday or Monday.

    • Signing Up: If you are a BPM member and someone forwarded this email to you, sign up here.

    • Slack: I leverage this quick real-time async coms platform to share:

    • Last minute reminders

    • Something found mid-week that might be interesting

    • Quick sharing of something new I found

    • Timely reminders

    • Announcements about problematic Zoom links before or during a session

    • Coaching Sessions: Three times a week, there are coach guided-sessions. Typically it is a mock. One person answers a question in front of the group then we all give feedback. See below for more details on mocks vs. workshops. Anyone can attend. The themes are rotated, so we don’t get stuck in one place, focusing on the loudest person or those with the biggest issues.

  • Weekly: Right now, I try to send them weekly. There was a bit of a break for the holidays, but I should be back into the routine this week.

    Format: I continually test. Originally, I was focused on Design questions, but I will look to add new sections. NOTE: When there are multiple sections (think Design, Strategy, Behavioral, etc. NO ONE should try to tackle everything that week. (See above for benefits of the archives).

  • Yes. The group mocks and coaching sessions are for everyone. The Hustle Club was an effort to help people to find partners. I supported that effort with coaching. But anyone can jump in to listen when they want.

  • To subscribe to the published Google calendar click here. Below are Zoom links if you want to create your own calendar invite.

    NOTE: Your coach is on the West Coast; default times are PST.

    • Design: Mondays: 5 pm PST/ 8 pm EST | Zoom Link

    • Strategy/Behaviorals: Wednesdays: 5 pm PST/ 8 pm EST | Zoom Link

    • Substack: Every week, in the ICYM (in case you missed it) section, I list links to the recordings that are posted on Squarespace.

    • Squarespace: You can follow the Squarespace blog for mocks and workshops.

    • Mocks: The candidate answers a mock interview question, and we give feedback.

    • Workshops: When no one is prepared to mock, I will turn the session into a workshop, and so the recordings are posted in a different area.

  • I have created an extensive set of educational materials I have shared with BPM (I typically charge customers $1,500 for access to just a fraction of these materials). See above for why Squarespace. You can sign up here. It is just $1 to keep spammers and bots away.

    Eventually, it will come automatically with BPM membership but we still need to figure that out. PLEASE use the email you leveraged when signing up for BPM. If you signed up for BPM with a business account, please change that before signing up for the interview materials. Jobs change, and when you leave your job, you will lose access and it is a pain to re-access BPM materials and get signed up for Slack, Substack and Squarespace.

  • The content is still a WIP (work in progress). You may occasionally find materials that have placeholders. This is why I highly recommend following the Substack weekly updates. Before they are sent all content is checked. Call it a forcing function for creating the content. If you do see something urgent that is wrong and doesn’t have a WIP marking on the page, an email to wendy-lynn@blackproductmanagers.com with the specific URL that is problematic and details of what is problematic or doesn’t make sense. If you see a Squarespace page with WIP in the title or top of the page, it is a known issue and I am still trying to finish creating the content.

    Note: I get lots of vague feedback like X or Y is missing. But no further context. Imagine you owned a product with 100+ pages and someone said X doesn’t work but gave no specifics. How could you help them?

    • Substack: See above. You can use historic substack postings to follow.

    • Don’t worry. Go at your own pace. No two people learn the same way. While I will have different themes from week-to-week, not everyone will be ready to execute on the content at that exact moment. That is ok. But if you aren’t ready to tackle a skill, don’t volunteer to be mocked in the group.

  • Too many people stopped showing up after signing up, so we decided on the day of. Don’t worry, if you want to be mocked, there are plenty of opportunities.

  • Test. Learn. Iterate. Test. This is the mantra of PMs around the world. I am testing out different ways to coach at scale and give people a shot at more customized feedback outside the group setting.

    Fail Fast. If I don’t see more than 2 or 3 people submitting recordings to these efforts, I will stop doing it. So encourage your fellow candidates to accept the challenge and present an answer for the challenges of the week.

    Prompt of the Week: I will give a prompt and ask everyone to take a shot at answering it.

    Teardown of the Week: For people new to PMing, a teardown/reverse engineering of a product is an easier place to start so I will be adding this to the options.

    BONUS: Once a month starting in January, I will draw a name from those who participate and given them a private coaching session.

    To see past prompts of the week, check out this blog on our Squarespace site.