How Do You Teach Digital Product Management? Tensions and Complements Between Theory and Practice – with Sascha Hoffmann (Professor of Business Administration & Online Management @ Hochschule Fresenius)

How Digital Product Management Is Learned, and What Product Leaders Can Take from Academic Didactics for Their Teams

How do you actually learn good digital product management? Honestly: most people stumble into it. Hardly anyone I know – myself included – has formal training in it. You land in the role by chance and then learn from practice, books, podcasts, and blog posts.

A problem quickly becomes apparent: not all content has good substance, and how well you learn depends heavily on your own organization. If you end up in a good team with learning-oriented leadership, you’re lucky – but you can’t count on it. That’s exactly the problem: getting into product management is often pure chance. I regularly talk to people who would like to become product managers, and even after twelve years of working in the field, I don’t have a clear answer on how best to start.

That’s what this episode is about: how do you convey product knowledge in a structured way? And how do you build a solid education for product managers? My guest, Sascha Hoffmann, Professor of Business Administration and Online Management at Hochschule Fresenius, a German university of applied sciences, brings a valuable perspective to this. He teaches the craft academically but stays anchored in practice – and he edited Digitales Produktmanagement, the German standard work on the subject, to which several of this podcast’s previous guests have also contributed. So it’s a perfect basis for anyone who wants to learn better themselves or develop their team. Enjoy listening!