Product Management 101: The Basics
With this story, I am beginning a thread of articles related to Product Management centered around others and my own experience and journey towards becoming a Product Manager.
I hope this fits the interest of aspiring product managers, seniors into this field as well as tech enthusiasts and evangelists. I have planned to share a lot of knowledge in forms of stories, videos, tutorials, product reviews and much more. Let’s see if I get enough time to make all of it for you. If you are interested in knowing about me, you can check the below section or directly skip to the basics section right after it.
Who am I?
I am an I.T. engineer, have done my MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Indore and am a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO®). To date, I have found 3 startups, one into IT outsourcing where we used to develop mobile apps and websites for clients across the world, the other was a hyper-local app centered around providing nearby deals and the last one was into e-commerce where we manufactured designer mobile cases. One of these startups was funded by an angel network and also got selected for the Founders Space accelerator program in San Francisco while two others were bootstrapped.
Starting in 2014, I have worked with numerous clients to build their products turning their ideas into reality and also developed two of my own products into successful startups. In June 2019, I got my first exit from the e-commerce company with 3X returns in just 4 years and this one was totally bootstrapped. :)
As of Nov’19, I am working as a Senior Product Manager at Frendy where we are building India’s largest social e-commerce application which has the community at its core. Launched in beta in Sep’19, we have gained 25000+ downloads on Google Play Store and more than Rs. 2 million GMV just within a month. This is just the beginning of our journey to create a rock-solid SUPER app.
The Basics of Product Management
According to me,
“Product Management is a process of turning your company’s vision and the needs of your stakeholders into a product that achieves that goal while keeping your end-user at the core.”
Let me break it down for you.
Company’s vision: Anything that is envisioned by you or your boss or CEO or the key decision-makers of the company who are working towards solving a problem.
Needs of your stakeholders: This will include everyone who is directly or indirectly connected to the end-user or customer and can have a direct effect on them. Everyone from sales and marketing, customer support, operations, finance, and other departments who in a way has something that directly corresponds to the end customer have their own requirements that need to be catered to while crafting a perfect solution for the end-users
End-user at the core: As a product manager, you always need to have user-centric thinking. Any solution, any addition to the product should be considered as per the usage of the end-user. A product without the customer at its core is as good as a home without a pillar!
What does a Product Manager do?
A product manager spends most of his time in understanding, analyzing and evaluating feature requests and business flow decisions, meeting with people from different departments to understand their needs, working with the tech team, the UI/UX design team and almost every department within the organization that makes use of the product.
One must realize that a product manager is ofter regarded as the Product Owner and sometimes also referred to as the CEO of the product. This is one of the core reasons that startup founders often find themselves into the shoes of a Product Manager as they have to understand the entire business well and deal with all the departments at the same time while having a sound understanding of the customer value.
The PM role is an extremely responsible role and you will be held liable for the entire product whether it is a super hit feature that has gone viral overnight or a major bug or defect that has gone unnoticed and is causing trouble to the end-users. It all comes back on to the shoulders of the product manager.
To become a successful PM, always remember to
- Acknowledge the hard work and efforts thrown in by your tech and design team whenever a product feature or release is appreciated.
- Stand in front for your entire team and take total responsibility whenever an issue comes up or there is a delay in product release or any defects that may pop up in the release builds.
General Terms used in Product Management
While most of you coming from the tech background will be aware of it, it's always good to rephrase the terms used on a daily basis by a PM in an agile environment using the Scrum framework. We will go through the detailed processes, frameworks, and usage in later articles where I will also share my real experience along the way.
Backlog: It is a list of all the features and specs that are going to be executed in the product development life cycle. The top of the backlog is considered to be of the highest priority and is well defined while as we move down the backlog, the requirements and specs may or may not be finely detailed and it should always be this way only.
Epic: Epics are used to name and collect stories, tasks or bugs that have one common objective. For example in an e-commerce website, Checkout can be named as an epic and all the stories, tasks and processes related to checkout will be linked to this epic.
Feature: Features are often regarded as a large collection of work that brings real value to its end-users. Generally, features are too big to be written down so they are broken down ahead into smaller stories and tasks. For example, Place an Order from the app is a feature that still needs to be broken down so as to make it complete.
Story: A user-story is defined as the key exchange between the user objective and the technology development team. It is used to make a clear understanding of what the user wants to achieve upon a particular action. and that the developer is also able to comprehend in an easy way. The general format for a story is “As a user, When I take ACTION, I want this RESULT”. For example, “As a registered user, when I click on Add to Cart on the product details page, I should be shown a confirmation message”
Task: A task is often used to break down stories further or sometimes also used as an individual item in the backlog when the information to be conveyed is very straight forward and does not require a story form to be linked with. For example, “Change the background colour to Blue”
Bug: As everyone knows, bugs are often reported by the QA testers when the story or task is sent down for review. The bug should be properly defined along with steps to reproduce the defect and what should be the desired action when corrected.
There are many more definitions to be covered which I will be doing in my later stories. Next, I will be covering sprints in detail and tools used for daily product management tasks.
To finish off, let’s have a quick look at how the above explained terms look in the actual product lifecycle management.
I hope you liked the first article in the Product Management 101 series. Please share, clap and follow to stay updated and also help out others interested in product management. Stay tuned for more on this series.
Check out valuable insights, tips, strategies and fundamentals on Product Management on my YouTube channel — Parth Amin’s YouTube Channel
