Product Management 101

I put together a few resources for my own reference and I’m sharing it with you all.

Building a Product

The core product question – how do you build a product or iteratively deliver new features? Here are some important considerations involved in thinking through this process.

  • Determine the business goals
  • Ask clarifying questions to ensure your product aligns with business goals
  • Validate the problem
  • Talk to stakeholders, analyze user behavior or use prioritization techniques to define  scope
  • Determine features and MVP (minimal viable product). Document requirements
  • Identify users and customers
  • Determine use-cases and prioritize them
  • Validate the solution. Determine metrics to track success
  • Identify and mitigate risks
  • Include cross team collaborations when building the product plan
  • Determine communication strategy across stakeholders and teams
  • Build prototypes and iteratively deliver product features using Agile delivery methods
  • Proactively solicit feedback from customers and stakeholders. Iterate on feedback
  • Create product launch plan for major releases and engage stakeholders like marketing, PR, sales and customer support to get everyone ready for a major launch.

Design Thinking

The 5 stages of design thinking. The stages can be repeated iteratively or run in parallel. 

  • Empathize (understand the customer)
  • Define (the problem)
  • Ideate (techniques to come up with different ideas: brainstorm, worst possible ideas, Scamper)
  • Prototypes (come up with prototypes of different solutions and evaluate each one)
  • Testing (this involves testing the prototype solutions)

Checkout this article for more information https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process. 

User Flows 

User flows help map out the flow of how the app design solutions work while user journey maps help determine a users emotions and feelings while interacting with the product.  Checkout this article for more information https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/user-journey-maps-or-user-flows-what-to-do-first-48e825e73aa8.

How to build user flows in Sketch: https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-make-user-flows-in-sketch-with-squid-quick-start-guide-fb4d214a880 

Prioritization Frameworks

A critical part of product management is to be able to make informed prioritization decisions. While talking to stakeholders and making data driven decisions based on customer behavior is critical to determine priorities, utilizing these prioritization techniques can also be helpful.

https://www.productplan.com/strategies-prioritize-product-features/

RICE is another great method of weighted scoring to help make practical prioritization decisions and comes highly recommended by other PMs.

https://www.intercom.com/blog/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-managers/

Conversion Funnels

This article does a great job of explaining the different stages in a conversion funnel to drive a user from 1) Awareness 2) Interest 3) Desire 4) Conversion (when you have locked in the customer) 5) Re-Engage (customer retention)

Pirate Metrics

Most PMs are familiar with what it takes to become a good pirate. AARRR! (Awareness Acquisition Activation Revenue Retention Referral) 

 https://www.activecampaign.com/blog/aaarrr-what-are-pirate-metrics/

Amazing articles/videos on product strategy

Amazing Books

  • Lean Startup
  • Decode and Conquer
  • Cracking the PM interview

PM Groups