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Product management role

A product manager is the CEO of a product: set the vision, the product strategy, and is at the intersection of product, customer and business. It is a business function.

Producer Manager's work

  1. Talk to customers. Survey, problems discovery, validate ideas with prototyping.
  2. Understand the market, research market. Understand the competitors.
  3. Create stories and product requirements.
  4. To the team, PM is the voice of the customers, but not the users. Define roadmap and feature backlog.
  5. Address what needs to be built, why and when it will be delivered. Create roadmaps, feature backlogs with prioritization.
  6. Work cross-functionally with development and business.
  7. Cost / business case - justification. Define success criterias. Define metrics of product usage.
  8. Story teller.

Project manager / Product manager

  • Project manager

    • Manage requirements
    • Create project plans, develop schedules
    • Estimate time and costs
    • Monitor project progress and control
    • Analyze and manage risks
    • Document project vision, stakeholders, assumptions, outcome...
    • Communicate with project stakeholders
    • Close of and sign off.

  • Product Manager (See above)

Getting Start

  • Discover and ideation

    • User research: talk to users and confirm hypothesis
    • Define the product vision or new vision

    • Define

    • Create a business plan, how much will it cost? What benefits with the project bring to the team?

    • Create the roadmap, what are the milestones of this project.

  • Prototype

    • Prototype to validate concepts
    • Define the MVP, what is the first iteration released to the users.

Business plan

Roadmap

  • Align customer's pains and needs to product feature to define priority
  • Aligning the product roadmap with the overall business strategy and goals.
  • Rely on data and analytics to inform product roadmap decisions. Use various metrics, user behavior data, and market trends to assess the performance and impact of existing product features.
  • Define PR/FAQ
  • Define the roadmap using agile approach, breaking down the product roadmap into smaller, manageable user stories.
  • Regularly evaluate and reassess the roadmap to ensure it remains aligned with the evolving needs of customers and the business.

Mastering Design thinking

Design thinking is based on logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning to explore the possibilities of what could be and create desired results that benefit the end-user (customer). It can, and should be used in the context of product management to better understand the end-users.

Design thinking is a human-centered, iterative, problem-solving, solution-based framework.

Iterative means that you will use the results to review, question, and upgrade any primary assumptions, understandings, and outcomes at the various stages of the design thinking process.

It encourages inclusive, multidisciplinary collaboration to exploit other people's skills, backgrounds, and thought styles.

Five stages

  • Stage 1 – Empathize: This stage's goal is to gain an empathic understanding of your users, their needs, and what they care for. You should observe, engage (e.g. through interviews) and empathize with people to understand their experiences, what they value and what motivates them.
  • Stage 2 – Define (the Problem): At this stage, the information you have collected in the first stage should be analyzed, sorted out, and sequenced in such a way that you can better define the problem you are dealing with.

  • Stage 3 – Ideate: You will start generating some rational concepts that seek to solve the problem by using the Stage 2 problem statement. Think out of the box. Generate ideas for future prototyping.

  • Stage 4 – Prototype: During this point, you will work with your team to create some cheap models to examine and test the potential solutions that have been suggested so far. Prototype acts as interactions with users to get feedback. You don't try to find the right solution. Each solution is prototyped, tested, approved, improved, rе-examined or rejected.

  • Stage 5 – Test: The successful prototyping approaches were tested using developers, evaluators, and actual customers in the sense of the real product. Testing is conducted to assess each model and to determine the degree to which it solves the problem being discussed. The results of these tests can be used to refine the problem, the prototypes proposed, and the solutions.

Design thinking can be used in large and small enterprises. The goal is to move away from an established way of thinking and approach a problem or project with the mentality of a designer.

Design thinking combines creative and critical thinking that allows organizing information and ideas, making decisions, improving situations, and gaining knowledge. It is a solution-focused mindset, not the problem.

Skills

  • Empathy, use design thinking empathy map as a tool to understand end user's pains, what they say, think, do.
  • Be data driven: customer survey, pricing study.
  • Working cross-functionally and leading without authority.
  • Dealing with ambiguity
  • Customer obsession and communication (story teller)

Sources