So you’ve just hired an incredible new product manager. Now comes the real challenge: How do you get them up to speed quickly, so they can start having the impact you hired them to create?
Here’s the truth: It takes time. Sure, you have well-thought-out onboarding, with comprehensive instruction in your company’s product, processes, culture, and key stakeholders. But no amount of training compares to real hands-on experience—and even when apprenticed to a veteran PM, it can still take months for a new hire to really understand the ins and outs of how your product works and how to drive an impact on your team.
A couple of years ago, this was exactly our experience. Despite all the support and training, it was taking new PMs a long time to get a real “feel” for the Duolingo product and how to present great Product Reviews, a core part of Duolingo’s product culture. We needed a faster and more systematized way to help new PMs acquire the all-too-important core Duolingo PM skillset.
The breakthrough came when we realized something critical: While shadowing experienced Duos was an essential part of onboarding, the experience was highly variable across individual PMs and was allowing new hires to stay in the “training wheels” phase for too long. To really develop a strong Duolingo PM foundation, new PMs needed a space to practice “putting the reps in” within the Duolingo product lifecycle—which can feel intimidating, especially when you're new and still getting comfortable.
So, our Product Operations team dreamt up a solution—a safe space where new hires could get the real hands-on experience of taking an idea all the way through the product development process...without the high-stakes pressure. And Product Bootcamp was born.
Product Bootcamp is a three-day immersive experience where new hires have the chance to build a product spec from start to finish. It’s like a super-focused, very structured hackathon, designed specifically for new hires to go deep, make decisions, build relationships, and learn through doing. Here’s a look at how we built it and what we learned along the way!
How we built it
Rome, er, Product Bootcamp wasn’t built in a day. It required lots of iterating and feedback—we used the “Green Machine” framework that many Duos use for pushing forward innovative ideas (you can read more about the Green Machine in the Duolingo Handbook!). Because this was for the Product Org, it was only natural to take a “product-building” approach to creating this program as well. This meant:
- Starting with the why: doing a lot of up-front work to identify the specific user needs and problems to solve with this training program
- Defining measures of success: aligning with leadership on the goals and measures of success of this program, both qualitative and quantitative
- Designing feedback loops for rapid iteration: creating a “V1” of the program and building in feedback loops to tweak and iterate as we learned along the way
The first iteration of the program ran in March 2023. It was a 3-day hands-on training, all in person, and it was structured like this:
- Introduction and skill building
- This included some group bonding, as well as several skill-based sessions led by PMs that would help the new hires understand core product skills at Duolingo, including product sense, analytics and ROI.
- Case study
- A senior PM would present a case study to show how a product feature went from idea to launch, tying together all the concepts introduced in the skill building session.
- Group project
- We split participants into teams of three—a PM, a Product Designer, and a User Researcher— present the group with a well-defined problem—something they can solve in two and a half days. For example, at our last bootcamp, the challenge was: Can you improve the onboarding to our Math course?
- We give them full ownership of the problem. They have two days to come up with a solution, with design and product leadership stepping in for occasional check-ins and workshops to offer guidance.
- Product review
- The training program culminates with a mock PR that loosely resembles Duolingo’s regular product reviews.
- Teams present their solutions to senior leaders (including Luis, our CEO!), and their work gets evaluated just like it would in the real world, but with lower stakes.
And then, because all work and no play is never the way, we close out the Bootcamp with a celebratory happy hour 🍻 Here’s what the initial 3 day agenda looked like:
The structure was strong, but there was iterating to do! The main feedback: This version felt too rushed and not personalized enough. People liked the skill building sessions, but the five we chose weren’t relevant for the entire group. People also wanted more time to just work on the project. This brought us to V2, which is pretty close to the program we run today.
Duolingo’s Product Bootcamp
The first change was the timing: Product Bootcamp now runs in the fall, which best aligns with when most of our new grads (coming from undergraduate or business school programs) start, and they’re the most valuable audience for the program. This also gives more time for new hires to onboard and get some of that initial training before diving into the bootcamp.
The second was transforming the skill-based sessions into “Product School”—a series of online training sessions and exercises that could be completed on demand at any time between start date and the bootcamp program. Nuos (new Duolingo hires) could complete these courses at their own pace, allowing them to move more quickly through concepts they were more comfortable with and spend more time on concepts newer to them. An added benefit: all of these Product School courses are available to anyone in the company!
This allowed us to make the third change: devoting all 3 days to the actual project. This hands-on time is extremely valuable for new PMs, and expanding the time spent was really valuable, because it gives new PMs the confidence to take risks, trust their instincts, and develop a much deeper understanding of how to operate effectively at Duolingo. They can experience the full product development cycle in a low-risk, high-learning environment; get visibility with senior leadership; and build community with their fellow PMs.
Seeing real results
We run Product Bootcamp once a year, and we invite everyone who has been hired since the previous one. So far, we’ve held three—and the results speak for themselves. Onboarding has gotten faster, and new PMs are more confident, collaborating more effectively, and contributing to the product organization in a more cohesive way. The two big metrics we track have shown signs of success:
- Leadership perception of onboarding performance: We wanted to make sure that leadership felt they were seeing improvements in new PM performance. As we’ve held more and more bootcamps, there was an increased positive perception around leaders who attended the mock PRs. They were impressed by how well the PRs went, and anecdotally felt this strong performance carried through their teams.
- New PM perceptions of learning and development: Of course, we want to know how this changes the onboarding experience for the actual Duos! After starting the program, our engagement score (a measure of how satisfied people are in the product org) increased, and PMs expressed more positive sentiment around support they received when onboarding within the PM org.
But maybe our favorite sign of success has been the way this approach has scaled to other teams. Our engineering function has developed “Hootcamp,” an engineering-specific onboarding program that also combines skill building and hands-on coding experience, and the design org is thinking through a possible program, too. Huge shoutout to Miriam Tillar, who partnered with me to build the V1 of this program within Product Ops and is now helping to scale this program across these teams from her current role on Duolingo’s Talent Development team.
In the end, there’s no substitute for real-life experience when it comes to training new PMs. But that doesn’t mean you can’t accelerate the process. Product Bootcamp is still in its early days, but it’s already one of the most valuable tools we’ve developed to build a stronger, more unified product organization—powered by ultra-talented PMs who really know how to get things done!