History of Product Management

Modern product management started in 1931 with a memo written by Neil H. McElroy at Procter & Gamble. He started as a justification to hire more people (sound familiar to any product managers out there?) but became a cornerstone in modern thinking about brand management and ultimately product management.

Purpose of Product management

Great product management organizations help a company set product vision and road maps, establish goals and strategy, and drive execution on each product throughout its lifecycle. 1

Bad product management organizations, in contrast, largely function as project management groups, running schedules and tidying up documents for engineers.

To build a great product organization you need to first understand the role of the product manager. Secondly, you need to hire individuals with the right skill sets, including a strong VP of product. Finally, establish a simple set of processes to enable the product organization and help the company scale its product development.

What is Product Vision

The product vision describes the WHAT and the WHY of a product and It’s highly aspiration and long-term

The product vision states what the product could ultimately become in support of your company’s overarching purpose. It reflects a team’s or company’s core values, purpose, mission, strategy, and goals. It’s often referred to as a team’s “true north”, defining the product’s direction and guiding the team’s every decision and action.

What is a Product Strategy

A product strategy is a high-level plan describing what a business hopes to accomplish with its product, and how it plans to do so. This strategy should answer key questions such as who the product will serve (personas), how it will benefit those personas, and what are the company’s goals for the product throughout its lifecycle.

Product Team

A product team is an autonomous group of people with a variety of skills and perspectives that support each other towards a shared goal. It has all the resources and authority it needs to complete projects on its own. It values cross-disciplinary collaboration and iterative delivery

Product Discovery

Product discovery is a set of activities that we perform with the intention of helping us to better answer necessary questions to define where, when and if we should evolve our product

From our experience, we know the importance of starting off product development on the right foot in order to minimize risks. To do so, we combine different roles to better establish a product idea before embarking on a whole project, bringing in stakeholders from the business side, product experts, developers, and designers.

The product discovery phase has three main goals:

Understand Complete our understanding of the business model, its context, goals and customers.
Analyze Align expectations in order to mitigate risks, define processes, create story maps, and so on.
Propose Set an initial backlog, a team, and a ballpark estimate for the development project.
An Introduction to Modern Product Discovery
An Introduction to Product Management: Discovery and Definition
Lean Product Discovery
A step-by-step guide for conducting better product discovery
Product Discovery process framework and tools
How to Set Up An Effective Product Discovery Team
Product Discovery is a Team Sport
Example of Product Discovery and Delivery Process with one team

User Research

User research is the methodic study of target users—including their needs and pain points—so designers have the sharpest possible insights to work with to make the best designs. User researchers use various methods to expose problems and design opportunities, and find crucial information to use in their design process.

Lean Experiments

The Lean Startup provides a scientific approach to creating and managing startups and get a desired product to customers’ hands faster. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup-how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business with maximum acceleration. It is a principled approach to new product development.

Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they don’t care about the idea, the startup fails.

Product roadmap

A product roadmap is a visual communication tool that aligns a company around a high-level product strategy. Depending on the type of organization, product roadmaps can include upcoming features and technical considerations, and often demonstrate how a product will evolve over time. Roadmaps communicate the intention of what customer and business outcomes a plan will achieve within a period of time.

The product roadmap is also a coordination tool: It gives stakeholders and team members the information they need to be able to focus their goals and priorities. Roadmaps bring visibility to all the moving pieces that help product teams coordinate their efforts; pieces like scope and resource allocation (and the why behind those decisions). The roadmap is the asset that communicates how those pieces form the strategy, in a way that can be understood by each and every stakeholder.

MVP

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.

Because the agile methodology is built on both validating and iterating products based on user input, the MVP plays a central role in agile development.

Metrics

Metrics, sometimes called business metrics, are quantifiable measures used to gauge performance or progress. To create a metric, you take data from a live source (i.e., it’s still updating with new information) and monitor it to track progress toward a business objective.

Frameworks

Frameworks are structured processes for how to measure the performance of a given product behavior. They effectively give you a set of best practices and tools that you can use in a similar situation. In practice, the implementation of any framework is very company, product, and question specific. However, these are good starting points for thinking through the analytics process.

AARRR: metric framework for evaluating product performance through the user lifecycle
HEART: metric framework for evaluating UX experience
Funnel analysis: analysis framework for evaluating performance through a funnel
Cohort analysis: analysis framework to evaluating performance across cohorts
A/B Testing: testing methodology to determine launch rollout ‍

Common Metrics

There are a few common metrics you can expect to see with software products. Each of them tell you common operational information that helps you measure progress and identify opportunities. The actual computation of these metrics can be simple or complex depending on the nature of the product.

SaaS metrics: these metrics are commonly used in enterprise apps
Engagement metrics: these metrics are commonly used in consumer apps
Return on Investment: this type of metric is commonly used in prioritization and making trade-offs ‍

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User Stories

In agile software development, a user story is a brief, plain-language explanation of a feature or functionality written from a user’s point of view. Many agile experts also describe a user story as the smallest unit of product development work that can lead to a complete element of user functionality.

Product teams choose to break development work into user stories instead of product features or product requirements for several reasons.

User stories:

Are easy for anyone to understand
Represent bite-sized deliverables that can fit in sprints, whereas not all full features can.
Help the team focus on real people, rather than abstract features
Build momentum by giving development teams a feeling of progress