This is a white label product management handbook for government digital services. Product management can be a vague profession, unclear to those of us doing it and misunderstood by our colleagues. Some aspects of our role may be legitimately difficult to write about but a lot of our knowledge is suitable to be made explicit through documentation. The first version of this handbook was created by Scott Colfer as an attempt to document the role of product management for the Ministry of Justice. This white label version has been created shared by Scott to see if the handbook has value for other government digital services. Much of this handbook is based on the work of others and their willingness to share, so it is important to repay the favour - hence publishing this handbook in the open.
- Markdown - text formatting syntax used when writing content
- Minimal - used as the theme for the site
- Jekyll - generates the site
- GitHub Pages - free hosting for the website
We'll keep this simple and improve if/when there are contributors :) Until then, some simple stuff to get things going:
- when contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to make via issue with the owners of this repository before making a change
- opportunities to generalise this handbook to make it useful to a wider audience without losing its core value are very welcome
- useful additions based on things you've found useful are particularly welcome
- additions for the senior product manager and lead product manager sections are particularly welcome.
If a code of conduct becomes useful then I'll probably use something like the contributor covenant.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
- Hat tip to everyone who's Tweets, posts, books, training, and conversations have informed the content of the handbook
- Thanks to the Ministry of Justice's community of product managers for using and testing the early, context-specific versions of this handbook.