Audience: This is for user who are looking for a basic overview of design thinking.

My notes are from this article on interaction-design website. I recommend it to everyone interested in learning this subject.

• Five non-linear steps of design thinking are: Empathize, Ideate, Define, Prototype, and Test. This article is helpful to go through these five steps.
• The seven factors that influence user experience:
  • Useful: A product must be useful to the users.
  • Accessible: Accessible is about ability of different-able customers to be able to use a product. Though the segment of customers could be small, it’s sometimes legally and sometimes ethically a critical element of a design.
  • Usable: Usability means how efficiently and effectively a product can be used by a user.
  • Findable: Find-ability means how easy it is for a user to find features within a product. A practical example is my wardrobe. If my clothes are easily findable, then those are more usable. Another example could be how easy it is to find the information on a website that you’re looking for.
  • Desirable: It is about the like-ability of a product by its users. For example, if I have two sources of learning a skill online, which one I will opt more likely.
  • Credible: It is about trusting the product. For example, a blog post is credible if a user can trust the the information on it.
  • Valuable: a product must delver the expected value. For example, if I read a book on a skills set, it must deliver the value of that basic skill.
• Five characteristics of usable products:
  • Effectiveness
  • Efficiency
  • Engagement
  • Error Tolerance
  • Ease of Learning
• Seven great UX research techniques: Card Sorting, Expert Reviews, Eye Movement Tracking, Field Studies, Usability Testing, Remote Usability Testing, and User Personas.
• Interaction design introduction: It is the design of interaction between a user and a product. Five elements of interaction design are: 1D: Words, 2D: Visual Representations, 3D: Physical Objects or Space, 4D: Time, and 5D: Behavior.
• Mobile Web UX design guidelines:
  • Keep navigation simple
  • Keep content to a minimum
  • Reduced the inputs required from users
  • Be mindful of internet connection issues

As I learn more, I will update this page. Thank you !

This is a Part 3 of three series:

• Part 1: Product Management (PM) role, Becoming a PM, Product life cycle, and understanding the company.
• Part 2: creating an opportunity hypothesis, validating a hypothesis, and taking an idea into action.
• Part 3: Working with design, engineering, and marketing. Finally, completing the product lifecycle.

Working with Design:

• User experience (UX) design: it is about how a user interacts with a product. A customer should use the product and use it in the right way. A user-centered design is an approach from a user’s standpoint in using a product.
• The design process has these phases: User research, information architecture, interaction design, prototyping, visual design, and content strategy.
• The design process starts before writing the PRD.
• Design relationship skills: A product manager focuses on an ideal customer and a design lead focuses on an idea user.

Note: I will revise the design details in the upcoming articles.

Working with Engineering:

• Relationship with engineering: it is important to build a respectful relationship with engineering. They are hard working professionals who do many more things in addition to writing the complex code.
• Software development methodologies: two famous mythologies are waterfall and agile. Waterfall is a lengthy and iterative process in that each iteration may take time. Whereas, agile is a short duration iteration process. Waterfall approach does not allow changes in between the process. Whereas, agile is a flexible approach. Scrum is an approach for agile development. Scrum uses time-boxed sprints.
• Kanban: Kanban is a process that controls the work in-process items and focuses on moving to the next steps. In a simpler form, Kanban board process suggests to-do, doing, and done steps.

Marketing of the product:

• Marketing a product: Marketing is important to launch a product successfully. Some companies have product Marketing Manager (PMM) roles that are external customer and partners facing.
• Product Messaging: Product messaging is important to let customers know why they should use your product.
• Launching the product: identifying a launch owner is a great way to launch a product. Going To Market ( GTM) can be divided into three steps: prelaunch, launch, and post launch. Prelaunch focuses on planning the launch by taking multiple steps. Launch focuses on mainly executing on the plan. Post-launch focuses on post launch analysis, marketing, and sales.

Completing the product life cycle:

It is important to celebrate the completion. it is also important to discuss how things went from start to end, to assess how the process an be improved for the future iterations.

Reference:

• The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager by Product School, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, et al.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_management
• Donald Norman’s seminal The Design of Everyday Things

The articles on product management has three parts:

• Part 1: Product Management (PM) role, Becoming a PM, Product life cycle, and understanding the company.
• Part 2: Creating an opportunity hypothesis, validating a hypothesis, and taking an idea into action.
• Part 3: Working with design, engineering, and marketing. Finally, completing the product lifecycle.

In the first part, we went through PM role, PM life cycle, and strategically understanding the company. In this part we will go through creating opportunity hypothesis, validating hypothesis, and taking an idea into action.

Creating an opportunity hypothesis:

There are ways like iterative progress or a big change step. Depending on the situation, a PM should decide if an incremental change is appropriate or if building a new product from scratch is appropriate.

• Goals: It is important to establish the goal for the product. A product can be built in a iterative way or as a one big release, depending on the goal.
• Quantitatively finding an opportunity hypothesis: Quantitative reasoning involves data analysis, to find the next approach. Qualitative reasoning involves understanding the vision of the product or the intuition based approach to determine the best step for the customers.
• Metrics and analysis: metrics and analysis is important to determine the next steps for the product.
  • AAARR metrics: it is an acronym developed by McClure for the products. It stands for:
    • Acquisition: how users visit your product
    • Activation: a users’ first experience with your product
    • Retention: a user’s liking to use the product again
    • Referral: a user’s liking of the product to refer it to other person
    • Revenue: a user finds the product useful enough to pay for it
• Surveys and customer interviews are helpful to assess the need and current situation of the product.
• Intuition: intuitions are good but it is important to understand from personas’ point of view. Will this idea help a user? If yes, how?
• Vision for the product is important and is developed by the team.
• Team ideas: A PM should be a team player who listens to all the ideas and helps making the right decision for the product.
• R&D: it is important to research an idea and plan to build it with the assessment of engineering and other feasibilities.
• The competition: understanding the competition is important, to decide the approach for the product. For example, for a technical blog, there is competition with many companies and bloggers. Should a new technical blog be one of many of offer something different that others are not offering? Or should the quality be high? How will a new technical blog make the position in the market?
• Business model and value proposition: Analyze how a product fits into the business and how the product provides the value to the customers. Here are key points about business model:
  • Key partners: outside the company, who are the key partners who make the business model work.
  • Key activities: what are the key activities. For example, a blog company’s key activity maybe content writing and website publishing.
  • Key resources: key resources could be human, physical (hardware), and intellectual properties.
  • Value propositions: what value a product provide to a persona, is the value proposition.
  • Customer relationships: this is about managing the relationships with the customers.
  • Channels: Channels are the ways a company reaches out to their customers. For example, for a blog company, Facebook, direct emailing, twitter, and other means could be channels to reach out to customers.
  • Customer segments: these are categories of the personas that the product will serve.
  • Costs structure: this is about finding the cost to maintain the product.
  • Revenue streams: this is about ways how the product will get the revenues. For example, technical books could be useful to generate revenues.
• External affairs: sometimes, there are external affairs as well. For example, what if a client offers a multi-year maintenance contract, if certain features are added per a client’s needs?
• Using Kano model to find opportunities: Per Kano model, a product needs three things, to be successful over time: 1. Value, 2. Quality, and 3. Innovation. As per this principle, there are three features:
  • Basic features: these are features expected from a product.
  • Performance features (satisfiers): these are features like how the app performs.
  • Excitement features (delighters): these are surprising, unexpected, wow features.

Over the period of time, each feature moves down. Excitement features becomes performance feature. Performance features become basic features.

Validating your hypothesis:

The next thing is to decide if it is the right thing to do. Every idea has an opportunity cost. Below are options s to validate a hypothesis:

• Customer development: it is a process of reaching out to existing or new customers, to know their pain points, goals.
• MVP or A/B testing: There maybe a decision to build an MVP. Or, maybe use an A/B testing. A/B testing is an approach to compare two sets of something. If idea is validated to be a good idea, next step is to plan for building it.
• SWOT analysis: SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threats. It helps to identify what’s important to focus on. To do a SWOT analysis, identify goals and success criteria.
• Internal validation: it is about asking key questions to understand if a product’s vision is aligned with the company’s vision.
• External validation: it is helpful to perform external validation. It means seeking feedback from customers about the product.
• Other ways: Interviews, Surveys, Analyzing data, Experiments, and A/B tests.

From idea to action:

Blow are key points to take a product from the idea to actions:

• Why new ideas struggle: there may be chances that customers no longer need the new feature in the product that you planned for. It is very helpful to anticipate next steps and avoid assumptions, as much as possible. Suppose my product is a eBook on work skills for IT professionals. If it takes six months for me to write the book, what if there are better options available in the market in the next six months? In this example, I should list out assumptions and address those.
• Working backwards for the future feature. Imagine your product is released and you are writing product reviews, product release, and product FAQ sections. These future preparation will help to assess the product. For example, if a writer is planning to write a book, what if he/she writes why and who should read the book, how this book is helpful to readers, and how it is different from other books.
• Plan for an MVP: Minimum Viable Product (MVP) does not mean an incomplete product. It is a great exercise to prioritize what minimum features will help the customers. Then, over the period of time, iterating and adding more prioritized feature helps. For example, if I am writing a book, identify minimum required areas to address first in the book. I can create a second book later, with additional details.
• MVPs and Plussing: MVP concept forces us to prioritize to the most important items. Plussing is a concept of adding a surprising element to it. This plussing concept has to be completely in-line with the core model. For example, if I am writing a book on technical product manager interviews, my MVP would be to cover the topics that the readers expect. The core idea of the book is to prepare candidates to clear an interviews. A plussing on it could be to share general tips on resume writing and networking.
• Communicating via a Product Requirements Document (PRD): A PRD covers the features of the products to be built. This should be helpful to all stakeholders. A PRD should include what’s covered and not covered in it. It should include. In a waterfall approach, a PRD is a detailed document. In a lead development approach, it is a lighter weight document that will be iterated frequently. In any case, a PRD is a live document. For a project scope items, a PRD should be written. For bug fixes or an enhancement, a PRD may not be needed and such item can be covered via a ticket or a similar system. Some other points: we humans are wired to learn in stories. So, writing the requirements in the form of stories is helpful.

Next, we will go through part 3: Working with design, engineering, and marketing. Finally, completing the product lifecycle.

Reference:

• The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager by Product School, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, et al.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_management

Why and who should read this article: read this article if you want to know the basics of a product management role.

This is a Part 1 of three series:

• Part 1: Product Management (PM) role, Becoming a PM, Product life cycle, and Understanding the company.
• Part 2: Creating an opportunity hypothesis, validating a hypothesis, and taking an idea into action.
• Part 3: Working with design, engineering, and marketing. Finally, completing the product lifecycle.

What is the product management role:

A product manager is someone who represents customers. A product manager is a person responsible for a product. He/she has multiple skills. On a day to day, a PM understands the business and execution strategy of a product. They know how to set the vision of the product.

How to become a product manager:

A product manager should be knowledgeable in product design, engineering, and marketing. PMs come to this role from various stream like development, designing, marketing, business, quality assurance, business analysis, and other such related areas. It’s always an added advantage for PMs to know programing.

Below are some skills that a product manager should know:

• A fundamental understanding of product design, engineering, and marketing.
• Understand who are the customers.
• Business strategy: A product manager should know the business strategy of the company. They should understand who all are players, how a company makes money, and understand the revenue vs. profit.
• Execution: a product manager should know the execution.
• Vision: they must know how to set the vision, see the right opportunities by using data and metrics.
• Defining the success: they must know how to define the success criteria of a product.
• Marketing: they must know how to work with marketing, to market the product.
• People skills: they must know how to work, appreciate, motivate, and lead people.
• Prioritization: PMs must know how to say “no”. A product manager understands what the customers want and prioritize to build limited features in the product.

Types of product managers:

• Technical product managers: A technical product manager is someone who is managing a technical product, like an API for a system. They focus on how products are built. They are not involved in coding.
• Strategic product managers: someone who has a business background and a compliment to a technical product manager.
• Other: like growth product manager, mobile product manager, etc.

Product management development approaches:

There are ways like lean development, waterfall development. Sometimes, companies prefer a hybrid of lean and waterfall approach.

Product development lifecycle:

1. Find/plan the opportunity: a product manager finds the right opportunity and plan for it. Product managers write PRDs (Product Requirement Documents) in collaboration with all stakeholders from business, engineering, design, analytics, and other teams. A Product manager also decides if the product will be built using lean or waterfall approach. There could be a plan to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) using the lean approach.
2. Design the solution: PMs work with design team to design a solution. The engagement from engineering is important to assess the technical feasibility of the design.
3. Build the solution: Once a product is defined and design is agreed, then the next step is to build the solution. There would be a need for a PM to negotiate releasing a quick solution or a long term solution.
4. Share the solution: This step is about sharing the product to the world. In this phase, if the set-up supports, there maybe a need of a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) who focuses on marketing. A PM will focus on the internal details of a product. Releasing a product maybe done in phases: a pilot, small release, and other subsequent releases. There may be a need to run marketing campaigns, ad, etc. to market the product and get the customer’s feedback about the product, to improve it for the customer’s needs.
5. Assess the solution: In this phase, PMs should evaluate the team’s situation like are they happy working on a next project and anything to be done differently. After the release, real data is available to assess the product. The after launch analysis of the product can help improve the further steps in the product development.

Strategically understand the company:

A PM should think of these things below:

• Understand why does the company exist: It is critical to understand why the company exists, what are core beliefs, and mission statement of the company. This should be the guiding principle in planning for a product. Understand customers and personas. In a simpler way, a persona is a customer profile type using the product. Let’s say, the product is a web browser,. An example a persona is a web developer. For the product web browser, it is critical to understand how this persona will use the product, web browser. Understanding use cases are important. A use case is a function of a product used by a persona. Understand if a product is build for an enterprise or for a customer.
• How do we know if a product is good: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) metrics can help determine if a product is good. Vanity versus actionable metrics: vanity metrics are those that are not directly related to product’s performance. These can be for some secondary or other benefits. Actionable metrics are the metrics that are directly related to the performance of the product. Analytics, surveys, and interviews can help to collect the right metrics about a product. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metrics to assess an overall customer satisfaction of the product. It measures how like it is that a user would suggest the product to others. NPS is a % of promoters minus the % of detractors out of all replies. Scale is 1 to 10. Detractors score from 0 to 6. Promoters score 9 or 10.
• What products are we building: It focuses on the company’s current products.
• Other things to consider: Plan for the roadmap of the product for the short term and a long term strategy. Understanding the competition & climate is also important to understand if the product we are building is competitive and fit to the market. A great analysis is called 5C analysis, to assess the opportunity for a product. The five Cs are: Company, Customer, Collaborators, Competitors, and Climate.

In the next part, we will go through creating an opportunity hypothesis, validating a hypothesis, and taking an idea into action.

Reference:

• The Product Book: How to Become a Great Product Manager by Product School, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, et al.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_management