Product management is about making choices: Use personas and product principles to help you with this.
Great product managers are intelligent, focused and “bilingual” in technology and business.
Only after finding a product opportunity to pursue does a product manager begin the product discovery phase: defining the right product to fit that opportunity.
when you launch the product, you can realize the second big advantage of a CUP: use the participants as satisfied customer references, which are essential for any successful product launch.
Product discovery: Validate that your product is valuable, usable and feasible by defining and testing a minimal product.
every product team can benefit from seeking out the smartest people in the company, regardless of function or position, and making them unofficial “deputy product managers.” If asked for ideas and feedback, they can deliver a surprising amount of value just based on their smarts.
a product manager must let them complete their work before tasking engineers with building the product. This is because good designers want to experiment with multiple designs, but the engineering process is not agile enough to facilitate this.
If management requests changes after this point, don’t lose focus on execution but rather start a new discovery process for version 2.0 of your product to run in parallel with building version 1.0.
How can you go about improving existing products? When you make changes to your product, think carefully about what you want to achieve and deploy them gently.
When improving products, be careful that you don’t unwittingly abuse your users, i.e. release changes that they don’t appreciate. To avoid this, ensure you deploy changes gently. This means you inform customers of changes well in advance and make the transition as painless as possible. Redouble your quality assurance efforts, and for major changes, consider running the old and new versions of your product in parallel, at least initially, allowing users to opt in as they please.
Product management is about making choices: Use personas and product principles to help you with this.
Their mantra is: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
Once you’ve validated a product and delivered the specifications to engineering, you must make a fundamental mindset shift from product discovery to execution. There should be no further changes to the product specifications after this.
Use a charter user program to understand your customers and gain references for your launch.
personas: fictional user profiles of (imaginary) typical customers. These personas are created by the product manager and interaction designer based on what they know about their potential customers.
the product manager to focus on discovering and defining new products while the project manager schedules and tracks the projects required to build and launch them.
lessons can be learned in the first week when the product is actually live. During this time, consider yourself in “rapid response” mode, addressing issues or lagging key metrics quickly.
Use high-fidelity prototypes to convey product specs effectively and to test your product on real users.
product managers bear full responsibility for delivering products as promised.
Product discovery: Validate that your product is valuable, usable and feasible by defining and testing a minimal product
When setting up a prototype test, first of all you’ll need test subjects. Gather them from whatever sources you can: friends, family or Craigslist recruits. All are fair game.
Second, be sure to prepare thoroughly beforehand. Define what tasks you want the users to complete, focusing on the tasks they are expected to spend the most time on.
During the test itself, the less you say, the better. Don’t taint the test subjects’ experiences with your own expectations. Your goal is to observe and understand where your model might be inconsistent with how a user thinks. Just watch: Can they complete the tasks easily? Do they find what they’re looking for?
If you identify obvious problems after the first test subjects, fix them immediately. This way, the next users can already test your new solution.
What are the best practices of building great products? A product manager must constantly seek out and assess product opportunities
a hi-fi prototype allows product managers to immediately test the product with real users. The sooner this happens, the easier it is to adjust the product according to the feedback.
A great way to gain deep customer insights is a charter user program (CUP). Basically, this is a program where you find and recruit 8–10 customers from your target market who suffer from the problem your product aims to solve. You then work with these customers as partners to develop and test a product to address this issue. Your end goal is to develop a product that works for your whole target market, so don’t fall into the trap of making a specialized product for just one or two of your charter users.
Product managers must also be engaging and versatile communicators. They must interact with lots of different stakeholder groups from engineers to executives, and hence need to be “bilingual” in the sense that they understand both the technology and business sides of the product.
don’t let their input directly steer the course you take with your product. Instead, stay focused on identifying customer needs, and think for yourself how to address those needs.
What are great product teams made of? Great product managers are intelligent, focused and “bilingual” in technology and business.Product managers need product teams around them with clearly defined roles.Make user experience design a priority: Build a complete UX team and help them contribute.
you should define a set of product principles: your beliefs of what’s truly important to the strategy of this entire product line and the company. In the case of a start-up, the company’s mission statement often embodies these principles.
product managers solve customers’ problems, and this requires them to understand their customers and empathize with their problems as well as be intelligent and insightful enough to come up with solutions.
product improvement should start with an understanding of what your goals are. You must understand the product’s most important business metrics and gear any improvements toward affecting those metrics.
In this endlessly shifting landscape, a product manager must constantly and quickly evaluate product opportunities and decide which ones to pursue. To help achieve this, she should answer a list of questions used to help define and communicate such opportunities, called a Product Opportunity Assessment (POA): What problem will this solve?Who are we solving a problem for and how big is that market?What alternatives do competitors provide and why are we the ones who can succeed in this?What factors are critical to success (e.g. partnerships with distributors)?What metrics will we use to measure our success?Why is this the right time to enter the market and what is our go-to-market strategy (i.e. how will we sell the product)?Based on the above questions, is this an opportunity we should pursue?
the product manager and her UX interaction designer should first come up with a minimal product prototype: one that has the bare minimum functionality necessary to be valuable, and yet delivers a realistic enough user experience for real users to test.
customers are notoriously poor at expressing what exactly they want from a product.
a UX design team, which ideally comprises four essential roles:
An interaction designer works to understand the target users’ requirements and thinking, and then creates a wireframe design of the product based on this understanding. After this, visual designers contribute the look and feel of the user interface on top of the wireframe. Essentially, these two roles create the user experience, making them a key part of the product team. They should be involved early on, taking part in everything from deciding on the product strategy to participating in customer visits.
Note that the importance of visual designers is often sadly underestimated. Their work has the power to evoke emotions in the customers, and if Apple has shown us anything, it is that products that evoke strong emotions, like love and craving, tend to be smash hits.
In addition to these two roles, you need a rapid prototyper who can quickly create prototypes of the product and a usability tester who then has users test the product, thus generating input for another iteration of the design process.
high-fidelity prototype: a prototype with minimal functionality, but a realistic user experience
A product manager’s main responsibilities are assessing product opportunities and defining products to address those opportunities. The product manager and her team must ensure the products launched are feasible, usable and valuable, by creating a prototype of the product and testing it with real users as soon as possible.
A product manager has two main responsibilities: evaluating product opportunities and defining the products to be built to address those opportunities
To be successful, a product must be: feasible: your engineers must be capable of building it. usable: customers must be able to use it. valuable: the product itself must deliver value to customers, so they want to buy it.
If you’re a product manager, understanding customers is a critical part of your job. In fact, it’s so important that you should attend every site visit, customer interview and usability test as well as use whatever market-research tools are available to really gain a deep understanding of customers.