Product Management:
Often viewed as mini-CEO’s, driving the development, launch and improvement for their features and products.
What is PM:
Product management is, at its core, identifying and defining problems. This requires a deep understanding of problems facing users.
Musts:
- have a deep understanding of the problem.
- Understand the user needs and how to create value
- Know their product
- Know the competition
How:
By answeing lots of questions.
PMs are responsible for figuring out what, for who, why, and when:
- who are the users
- What the team should build,
- what the product should do, what kinds of features
- what does the people want,
- what are the users needs, different types of users
- Why are we solving the problem and why are we building this specific solution,
- What is the impact of choosing this specific solution over the others
- When are we building this?
- What are the priorities to build first and what goes on the roadmap for later?
Skills of a PM
- Vision and strategy
- They are focused on building and bringing successful products to market. They need to be hyper aware of the user needs, have intuition about how the users will respond to new features and changes in the products, and map out the steps that need to be taken in order to get the product to its full potential and vision. Along the way of doing this, PMs need to be able to course correct as they learn new information
- Communication
- Pms are constantly communicating out and responding the questions. They are the source of truth of the current state of the product. Product shortcomings, opportunities, what the team is working on, and when those projects will be delivered. They need to communicate across a variety of different audiences, like, (design and engineering team, executives, or costumers).
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- PMs also act as the glue that hold the company together. They are in the only role that sees the product all the way trough the development process.
- Design might not be aware of what the marketing is working on and vice versa. Support might not be aware of new features that engineering teams build.
- With this end to end visibility, PMs connect people across the team and share information in order to facilitate reaching shared goals and objectives.
- Adaptation
- Having the wisdom to adapt by responding to new information accordingly
- They also have to constantly respond to new information and decide what to do.
- Example: (this might be change in strategy, competitor launching a new product, or results for an user study.)
- Dealing with fires:
- Tackle issues as they come up. Like bugs or problems that arise
Summary
Product Managers spend a lot of their time:
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Identifying/defining problems
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Creating a strategy
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Communicating
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Coordinating development
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Responding to fires Which in turn, allows them to strategically answer important questions:
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What are we building?
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Who are we building this for?
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Why are we solving this problem? / Why are we building this specific solution?
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When are we building this?
Why does it matter:
Bringing products to market is super complicated task. The PM plays an important role in the leadership.
There is a huge need of someone that focus on understanding the user and the problem so that the team does not loose sight of the important things that matter.
The pm also plays an important role in aligning all the other team and orchestrating them so that they are moving in the same direction.
One of the most important things to do is identify and define what kinds of problems the team should solve. Its important to make sure to solve the right problems, not all problems.
This means building something that the people want. This means solving a real problem for real users. This means something that is needed and creates value for the user and the company.
Two of the most common types of value exchange are users paying directly for your product, or users being willing to see ads in the product.
People will build things that they themselves want. Often the problems that is built doesn’t solve the problem for enough people to create a viable business.
PM also plays an important role in connecting various functions and teams across the company. PMs understand the business, advocate for the user, power design, create stability for the engineering team, and get everyone excited, and at the same time, keep everyone focused and moving in the same direction together to build a product.
Product Management makes sure that the team is spending their time on meaningful, worthwhile problems — by solving problems that exist for real users by creating products that people want.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the role of a PM and a PM’s critical partners
- Build roadmaps and write PRDs
- Identify and size opportunities
- Create a business case for a new product opportunity
- Define the use cases of a product, including its KPIs
- Build a projected revenue model for your new product
- Put together and present a compelling product pitch to gain internal stakeholder buy-in