Product Management
A product manager's job is all about solving problems for the customer. Creative thinking, problem-solving, and curiosity, is what drives me. I feel at home where I can practice, learn and grow a ton. Product Management for me, is the best overall fit for all my experiences and skillsets. From scheduling and management to UX design and Agile environments not quite the unicorn.... more of a pegasus.
My recent product experience includes consumer Saas product lines. Specifically owning and managing 9 mobile applications, 1 Chromebook application, and a Consumer web-based platform, I used my product management training and user-experience training to help launch 6 net new products with my company in less than 3 years.
Methodologies:
Market Research
Gantt Chart
Agile ceremonies
Flow diagram
Requirement documentation
Design Iteration meetings
Product Demos
Product Line Reviews
Quarterly product reporting
Systems used:
Microsoft Teams
Confluence
Jira
Adobe CC
My Product Strategy
The Product Process starts with Strategy and end it with Execution.. For me this is an unrealistic approach. I believe there are fundamental steps to be taken, in order to produce a complete product strategy. This begins with with a Business or Customer need. Once you call out a NEED you can draw up a product VISION > Once you have your vision you can form a GOAL > Once you have a goal you can finally document your product's complete STRATEGY.
After formulating a complete strategy you either get the 'Go' or 'No Go' from leadership to continue.
Product Lifecycle
Taking a new Product Strategy to Product Ideation:
Continuous planning is needed for each products length of time a product is introduced to consumers into the market until it's removed from the shelves. Each product lifecycle stage ( Introduction, Growth, Maturity, or Decline) has many steps involved. Its important to me to know where each product currently sits and plan for its future.
Mental Model Mapping
One activity I learned in a conference 3 years ago was Mental Model Mapping. Below is my adaptation of what they taught to us plus additions of some UX techniques to get to the bottom of what users are doing, thinking, feeling. This activity is one of my favorites to use when working on a new product line and or teaching it to others to use to their benefit.
Conducting the MMM Activity
First layout out your products stages/steps. This could be from purchase to install to usage. It could be as simple as a user journey within your application getting a user from point A to B. List out each step they take in the top row.
Behaviors- document per each step what are the user behaviors
Thinking - this is important to uncover if the user is using system 1 or system 2 analysis when completing the task.
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System 1 – quick system thinking, no time to waste, hurried decisions. Click and done process
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System 2 – methodical, purposeful, long thought process. User may do more research before making a decision
Doing- when you observe where the user clicks, where they go for each step, this will bring a new level of awareness
Feeling - How are they feeling? Are they excited to book a trip, are the frustrated but each step, what types of feelings do they have at each step?
Pain Points - probably one of the most important steps in this activity is to uncover the unknowns. And these may include pain points. Many pain points are known already (comments, feedback, user testing, etc) but what about the unknown pain points? Documenting all pain points is important.
- Once everything above it fully documented its time for the lower section of the diagram to be filled out: solutions-
Opportunity- Prioritizing solutions per the pain point would be an activity to do post activity. Not all opportunities are pain point solutions. Opportunities could include enhancements, cross-sell/ upsell, better usability, new features, etc. I like to like out all opportunities first and then plan prioritization (must have, nice to have, could, won't)
Cognitive Friction - The conflict between our expectation and the way the interface works is called cognitive friction. What unexpected results (!) did you uncover? Friction free is the goal, where in the user journey was does the user experience friction ? Document all possible scenarios for awareness.
Design Friction - this could be intentional or not intentional. Is the user taking more steps more clicks more taps to completing the step ?
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Example of intentional design friction you want to show a pop up that says "Are you sure you want to continue onto this bad website" with an extra disclaimer and visual warning. Or
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Example of unintentional design friction - Making the users enter their info again (uggg so frustrating) if they've already entered it once they should never enter it again.
Other helpful things to uncover during your mapping activity:
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Incomplete tasks create user stress
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Too much to focus on causes mistakes
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Humans fixate on completion of a task
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Laws of a task:
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Order matters
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Users don’t want interruptions (popup subscriptions asks)
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Users will forget the steps when done/afterwards
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Use qualitative data to understand the tasks the users needs to complete
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Identity common steps
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Clarify the finding
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Draw out your diagram make it BIG.
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Roadmapping growth
Similar to understanding a products maturity and planning for it is also roadmapping growth. Emphasis is on trying to understand how the future will be different from the present and the impact this will have on product planning. For me, understanding upstream and downstream cycles reduces risk and gaps.
Downstream - (improving & promoting the product) Reinforcing and protecting sales performance, product marketing campaigns, renewing and revitalizing declining products, relaunching and redesigning select products, and retiring failing and mature products. Identifying where a product lies in the overall lifecycle and choosing the appropriate strategy is core downstream activities.
Upstream- (define, create, or improve the products long term plan) Developing roadmaps for various audiences and at different levels of details; (internal vs external), creating relationships with customers, partners, or other stakeholder; and getting business sign off for new initiatives.
Lessons Learned
Beyond shipping new features on a regular cadence and keeping the peace between engineering, design team, Sales, & Marketing I believe the best PMs create products with strong user adoption that have exponential growth and add business value.
Each development team is different for each product line. They each have their own preferences of likes and dislikes. Getting to know the team individually has been a good lesson for me to learn.
Making sure to have all stakeholder's signoff documented has also been a good lesson for me to learn. Nothing worse than a product being fully ready to launch and Sales throws up a roadblock or Marketing didn't notice a certain feature and has a problem.
Also inviting all the stakeholders to a demo does not equate to them paying attention or signing off. Formal processes and documented agreements are essential at preventing churn or delays.
Product Management Competencies
While I think having the best of both worlds for PM & UX in my tool belt its important for me to be self aware and call out my room for improvment. Always room to grow !
Once you stop learning, you start dying - Albert Einstein
Customer Feedback
Conducting customer interviews and user testing
- Expert Level
Pricing and Revenue Modeling
How to generate income. Objective of pricing and revenue management is to stimulate demand from different customers to earn the maximum revenue from them.
- Novice level
Resource Allocation
Scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource availability and the project time
- Skilled to Learner level
Running Sprints
Design Sprints, Development sprints, agile ceremonies
- Expert level
- Skilled level
- Learner level
Success Metrics
Reporting and analytics. ROI and KPI analysis. Net promoter scoring
- Learner level
Market Assessments
Comparative/Competitive analysis. Market cost analysis Output of a Problem Statement
- Skilled level
Roadmapping
Feature prioritization and managing the backlog
- Skilled level
Requirements
From business to technical requirements and vice versa
- Learner level
Continued Education
From confidence, self improvements, new skills and more productivity.
- Continuous Learner