Rocket Role is a Product Manager's personal mentor and trainer, delivering tailored, bite-sized growth insights seamlessly through Slack. It assists PMs in honing their skills and adopting best practices in their fast-paced, busy work environment.
Hi PH! Long-timer ProductHunter and creator here – it's great to do a launch again, and I'm super excited to bring Rocket Role to you along with my co-founder @lukebelbina!
I've been in product management for 10 years and spent the last 2 years as VP of Product managing a team of PMs. I always struggled to hold myself and my team accountable for consistent, targeted, high-quality professional development. Luke previously built a software consulting company up to 40 people and then exited it – he had the exact same issues with his team.
Unfortunately, paid coaching is cost-prohibitive for most people; insights from books are podcasts are rarely acted upon; and paid courses are often forgotten about a few weeks after completion (you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been on one!)
The way professionals upskill is going to change thanks to things like AI and the tooling we're creating. We're super excited to be working full-time at the forefront of this transformational time.
We envision a future where everybody learns from a digital twin of their favorite creators and mentors. Imagine how quickly you’d improve if you had a world-class coach sat next to you every day giving you advice. That’s what Rocket Role is – almost indistinguishable from the actual person mentoring you in Slack, and when you do need to ask a question you can escalate to async, text-based mentorship depending on your subscription plan.
This is NOT just another chatbot or wrapper around ChatGPT. Rocket Role actively pushes you to improve as a product manager by not only training you on best practice directly in Slack, but also holding you accountable to actually implementing what you’re learning with optional challenges, reminders, and more.
Rocket Role is predicated on push and pull education. It acts as your own personal mentor, and as it learns about you over time it becomes increasingly useful. Here are some of the things it can do today:
1. High-quality, extremely actionable advice. The most concise and useful advice for product managers on the internet - we sweat the detail a LOT.
2. Set challenges. You can't read a piece of advice once and make it useful forever - you have to use it regularly to make it second nature. Rocket Role sets you optional challenges to reinforce your learnings.
3. Special guests. We work with the world's best product leaders and bring in their personal experience advice and tips directly into your lessons.
4. Assess skills. Rocket Role asks targeted questions on very specific Product Management skills which it'll not only use to assess your improvements over time, but also to make sure its advice is always as tailored as possible.
We've worked closely with our beta community to build the current feature set, and are iterating consistently as a team of 2 working on this full-time. Other features include:
1. ChatGPT in your Slack within the Rocket Role app
2. Set preferences - choose frequency and times to receive lessons
3. Gamification
The course we’re releasing today has been built entirely on top of our core technology which we’re currently beta testing with creators who’ll soon be selling their own “digital twins” and course on the Rocket Role platform… We’re excited to be able to announce some of the amazing coaches and trainers we’re working alongside in the coming weeks.
If you sell a course or sell your time as a coach/mentor/consultant in any way, then Rocket Role can not only provide your clients with a completely new and improved experience… it’ll enable you to reclaim your time whilst your digital twins train your clients, with you being on hand for any questions as we when needed. If this is interesting to you, please request an invite to the creator program: https://www.rocketrole.io/creators.
Thanks!
Joe & Luke
Hey @ben_preston_marriott1! 😄
Thanks so much! Yes definitely. We're using engagement with users (and non-users!) to prioritise which platform to move over to next. It is very likely to be MS Teams due to the volume of users there, but we're waiting until we have enough justification to spend time building those integrations vs. continuing to improve the Slack-based product.
We've had some requests for various integrations too like SMS, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc.
At some point I see us building out a suite of integrations to grow our market share. When we've fully opened up the platform to creators, I can see Slack no longer being fit-for-purpose for most people, and so we'll need to hustle to get it all built at least before then. For example, we're working with a professional course creation agency who have clients in a tonne of different industries outside of tech that like the sound of accountability and a new way to do coaching.
Lots of the coaches and trainers we talk to understand that the professional development and mentorship space is going to be disrupted significantly in the coming years, so they really enjoy working with and staying close to us as one of the many companies trying to drive the change.
But yeah... TLDR MS Teams will arrive at some point, but isn't currently on the roadmap for the next 3+ months (unless something changes) 😊
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Congrats on launching!!
Really like the concept of Rocket Role as I've previously struggled to hold myself accountable for completing courses that I've signed up to.
I think it's great to focus the courses on PM roles initially as you should get valuable feedback and insights to help build out the product - are there any plans to expand to other roles / industries in the future?
Thanks @tom_preston1! You've been so helpful in letting me vent ideas and giving us high-quality feedback for this so far - super appreciative.
Yes definitely. We see a tonne of value in the product management space as this is my background. It's an entry point for us to test the delivery mechanisms we've built – I.e. does this type of training/coaching via Slack add value beyond the options which already exist?
We're slowly opening up the platform to professional course creators and coaches who can use it to teach and mentor whatever they like. Again, we've gravitated to product coaches initially to make sure we lean into what we know, and it lets us leverage the user base we've been working hard to build.
The natural progression for us at this point is expansion into other professional tech areas such as marketing, engineering, commercial, and so on... and then also very broadly into the leadership and soft skills space.
There's a lot of potential to leverage our platform to raise an entire company's capabilities when it comes to soft skills – giving/receiving feedback, managing up, etc. so I'm excited to see how our creators hone in on this opportunity.
We've also talked with some users about how Rocket Role can actually be more of a connective tissue between teams and departments. So not only improves an individual's skills but also how different teams work together more effectively.
Looking forward to your continued feedback!
Great work! I'm increasingly interested in the question "What business are we in?". So, in that spirit, what business are you in? Are you an accountability product? A training product? Something else? If you had to choose only one.....
Thanks so much @edward_thomas2! Really appreciate it. I think the hard part is still ahead of us, but it's such a relief to launch today and we're having a lot of fun building together!
Hope you're doing well – your home build is looking 🔥🔥🔥
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Congratulations on the launch! This is great news for all PMs to stay on top of their game. Best of the luck!
Thanks so much @sinancakan! I'm loving having you in our community and giving us early feedback. It's so exciting to meet people like you who are like-minded and share our experiences and vision! 🚀
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