Project management practice exercise for product managers

What is the challenge scenario?

Meridian is a B2B SaaS platform for HR teams, covering onboarding, performance reviews and compliance training. You have just joined as a product manager, and a colleague hands you a folder before Thursday's retrospective: read this, we shipped Skills Passport last month, it did not go well.

The original week one brief promised a skills profile page, manager endorsements, certification uploads and an LMS integration with Cornerstone OnDemand, launching in week 12. The launch announcement, sent in week 18, six weeks late, quietly dropped the LMS sync and PDF export to a later quarter. The post mortem quotes are polite: the PM says the vendor's API documentation was incomplete, the engineering lead says the integration was scoped at two weeks and took six, the account manager says the biggest enterprise client had already been told it would be ready, and the CPO says the team learned a lot about working with external vendors. Nobody names the actual root cause. They describe symptoms.

What are you asked to do?

Compare the original brief item by item to what actually shipped, for the feature scope, the LMS integration, the PDF export, the launch timeline and the enterprise client's readiness, and say what each gap reveals about where planning broke down. Read the post mortem quotes again and identify the actual root cause, the assumption in week one that caused most of the damage, distinct from the proximate causes people mentioned, and name the earliest moment someone could have caught it. Reclassify how Cornerstone, Brightpath and Legal were treated in planning versus how they should have been classified, and what would have changed. Write the risk register that should have existed on day one, using only information available in week one, with a likelihood, an impact and a specific mitigation for each risk. Close with the honest, under 150 word post mortem note the team actually needed, naming the specific failed assumption and one concrete change to how briefs get written.

What does a strong answer cover?

This bootcamp does not publish a rubric for its practical challenge, so check your own draft against the curriculum's own questions instead of a worked solution:

• Does the gap analysis compare what was promised to what actually shipped, item by item, rather than a general summary of the delay?
• Does the root cause name the specific assumption that failed, rather than a category like poor planning?
• Does the stakeholder reclassification say specifically what should have happened differently for each party, not just how they were mislabeled?
• Does the risk register include a real likelihood, impact and a specific mitigation action for each risk, not a vague intention?
• Does the closing note name one concrete change to how briefs get written, rather than a general resolution to communicate earlier?

Skills this exercise practises

Reconstructing a project timeline from conflicting documents, distinguishing a root cause from its symptoms, correctly classifying external stakeholders, writing a real risk register, and delivering an honest post mortem note without assigning blame.

Which bootcamp does this challenge come from?

This is the practical challenge from Project Management for Product, Builders Camp's one week bootcamp on planning, dependencies, communication and risk management for product delivery, led by Andre Albuquerque. Completing it counts toward that bootcamp's certificate. The PRD template and product roadmap template guides both help catch the kind of scoping gap this exercise is built around before it ships, and the product strategy case study exercise elsewhere in this series practises writing under similar real world pressure.

Builders Camp runs live and self paced bootcamps in product management and AI product building. See the Project Management for Product bootcamp for current cohort dates and the full self paced curriculum.