Welcome to My Product Squad
A place where young developers, designers, and engineers team up with aspiring Product Managers and experienced mentors to gain real world experience and sharpen their skills
My Product Squad Overview
My Product Squad is a FREE community which anyone can join to gain real world experience (with mentorship) developing a new product as a member of a product team. The scope of the products is only capped by your imagination and dedication to learn. This means software, hardware, ecommerce, or anything else you can think of.
Why Join My Product Squad?
There is not one reason you should join us, but a few good examples are listed below:
- You lack real world experience to get the job you want
- You want to sharpen and develop skills you already have
- You love working as part of a team to accomplish a common goal
- You love solving problems
- You want to create and work on something new and exciting
Who is My Product Squad for?
- Aspiring Product managers looking to gain experience and learn
- Experienced Product managers looking to sharpen their skills or start a side project
- Developers, designers, or engineers looking to sharpen skills, learn new skills, build their portfolio, or start a side project
- Mentors and coaches looking to join a team and help give back and develop these young professionals
- ANYONE that your product team recruits and needs to build their products
How do we know what Products to build?
At My Product Squad, we always start with a problem. Starting with a problem will draw teams together who are passionate about the subject, give the team purpose and relevance, and ultimately make the product worth building. We utilize the “Idea Center” to brainstorm within the community to list real world problems. From here, you can form a team based around that particular problem, and begin developing your product. Anyone can submit a problem at any time!
How does it work?:
Step 1: Visit the Idea Center
- The idea center is a place where the community submits real world problems to solve
- Anyone can submit a problem at any time
- Once you find a problem you like, start recruiting your team, or join an existing team
Step 2: Schedule a team meeting
- You will have email addresses to all of your teammates once the team is formed
- We recommend scheduling a team meeting to discuss responsibilities for each role, discuss what methodologies you will use, and discuss when you will meet again, and what milestones you intend to complete prior to
- Once you schedule the first team meeting, the rest of the product is on your team to determine how you proceed
- Once again, we recommend bringing a mentor to the first meeting, because they will most likely be able to provide guidance to kick off the product development plan effectively
Step 3: Recruit and discuss
- You will most likely run into a roadblock at some point. Maybe you dont have as much time to commit as you thought. Maybe you need someone with more expertise in a particular subject. This is where you go and find more team members!
- You will also have access to a discussion board to post any issues, questions, or lessons learned with the rest of the community.
Who am I, and why did I create My Product Squad?
I am a former U.S. Army Officer, who spent ten years leading, coaching, mentoring, and developing teams. As I was transitioning out of the service, I discovered that I wanted to become a Product Manager, because this is where my skill sets met my passions. Books and online classes were great, but they werent landing me the jobs I wanted. I also didnt want to pay someone thousands of dollars to work on a mock project, without guaranteeing me a job afterwards, which is a very common scenario. Unfortunately, the majority of jobs available required at least 3 years of experience that I just didnt have. I quickly realized that this problem was common, and that over 45% of 300 aspiring or current Product Managers I surveyed had the same problem and said the number one challenge to breaking into the role was that they did not have the experience, and couldnt get it. This is why I formed My Product Squad.