Product Development

Think of it as a deposit you earn every time when you work with every team member

• guide the team

• become credible

• build trust

To become credible, use your first few weeks in the new job as the perfect opportunity to seek answers to your questions, validate your assumptions, and know who the competitors are. Use the opportunity to gain information about the company, the market it is trying to serve and the product.

In other words:

• Know your company

• Know your market

• Know your product

There is no end date to stop learning but definitely use the initial 2-6 weeks after joining the company to learn the above.

Start with the Mission, Vision, and Strategy

Knowing your company goes beyond the mission, vision and strategy. It is about knowing the details that go into defining the strategy to support the company’s mission and achieving the vision.

• Who is the target customer?

• What are the customer’s unmet needs?

• Who are the competitors?

• How does the company create value?

• How does the company grow?

I highly recommend spending the initial 2-6 weeks of joining as a Product Manager to acquire the above knowledge to believe in your own message, define the problem to solve and identify the solutions.

• Psychographic Segmentation is used to categorize people based on their values, interests, opinions, and attitude.

• Demographics Segmentations is used to categorize people based on race, gender, and other demographic traits.

• Behavioral Segmentation is another key attribute that will help you understand user behavior. What action do your customers take, why do they take it and when i.e how frequently. In our Sworkit example, the exercisers prefer to work out on a regular basis (could be twice a week, five a week) depending upon a combination of factors such as their fitness level, time available to workout.

• Needs-based Segmentation The key to success will be understanding their unmet needs that will help you pick the right problem to solve.

• Google Analytics

• Mixpanel

• Kissmetrics

Becoming a storyteller means moving away from requirements, numbers and graphs and focusing on the user, their problems and the impact to make it more engaging for the audience to believe in the problem, the proposed solution and impact of solving it.

• What problem is being solved?

• How does it impact the user?

• What is the impact of solving the problem on product strategy and goals?

• What is the solution?

You cannot say “Yes” to every idea or feature. Focusing means saying ‘no’ to really good ideas sometimes. Delivery of this feedback and how you engage in this conversation is key to guiding the team members without affecting the trust you have built so far or decreasing the earned social capital

• Listen with intent to ask clarifying questions

• Always Follow-Up: Paraphrase succinctly

• Always Follow-Up: Share your objective rationale

• Attitude and body language matters

As a product manager, you cannot skip meetings unfortunately. Meetings are essential to discuss and make decisions to progress or unblock the team, use it wisely to be effective and productive.

• Plan your meeting

• Make the meeting meaningful

• Always Follow-Up : Broadcast the outcome

• Focus on team dynamics

  • Talk with the Engineer and the Researcher to hear both sides of their story and validate their concerns.

  • Work with them to come to a resolution.

• Identify the real problem to solve and the goal to achieve

  • By working with the team, you can identify the root problem and goal to solve that problem.

• Evaluate solutions against guiding principles

  • Don't forget to evaluate these new solutions against your guiding principles.

• Driver

  • Limited to one person

  • Moves the project forward

  • Usually the Product Manager

  • Additional Responsibilities

    • Schedule and run meetings

    • Gather feedback

    • Negotiate with decision-makers

    • Make trade-off decisions

    • Followup with stakeholders

• Approver

  • Try to limit to a small group

  • Has final say on a specific aspect of the project

  • The person in this role varies

  • Not all items need to be approved

  • Having one person as the approver expedites the process

• Contributor

  • Give opinions or expertise

  • Do not make decisions

  • Can be assigned to many different roles in an organization

• Informed

  • Are updated on the progress as it impacts their work

  • Do not make decisions

  • Could be anyone who's work is impacted