Hey! Less Talk, More Work.
Sheldon Cooper – The Big Bang Theory
You don’t learn how to be a product manager, without creating a product.
Don’t worry, its okay if you don’t build the product, but you still need to ideate and create one. If you came here without reading part 1, here is the link.
Creating a product first hand shows you some information, that you must always capture, whenever you manage your next product as a Product Manager
- Why does this exist? – This is answered in two parts. a. What problem does this product solve? b. What benefit does it bring to the inventor/company?
- What does this product do? – Learn to describe whatever product you are managing, in one simple easy to understand sentence, regardless of how complicated your product is in reality. Consider this, if you are an AI/ML scientist, working on reducing air pollution by directing traffic patterns of vehicles, you can say – I help tell cars where to move, so they put less smoke in the air. Always remember the rule, if you are good at your job, you must be able to explain it to a five year old.
- What is my goal? – Every product manager has a goal, a charter if you will. Anyone can manage a product, but it takes skill and patience to manage it, nurture it, and grow it into something delightful. (Be a good parent!) So find your goal. Measuring your goal is called something in Product Management. Do you know what it is? It’s called finding the North Star Metric. This is the goal that your company will judge itself on, and you on.
Say you a product manager at Youtube Premium. Your North Star Metric could be, number of premium subscribers. The higher the number, the better you are at your job, regardless of how many hours you work.
Once you launch your product, monitoring it, making optimisations and enhancements, launching new features, now that is another story for another day. Let us focus on creating a new product for today.
How to invent a product?
Well its simple. Just follow this time tested process –
It’s as simple and as complicated as this diagram.
- Identify a problem : A good product manager is nothing but an inventor, waiting to spot a problem to invent something for! Always be on the lookout for problems, even if your users have taken those problems for granted. A good problem, is one which has –
a. Enough frustration : It should be a problem that people hate!
b. A big enough market : It should be a problem that ails a lot of people
c. A worthy market : The people should want to pay you to rid themselves of that problem. No point in creating a luxury car aimed towards a target market, that only cares about cost and mileage. - Experience the problem : There is nothing like walking a mile in the other person’s shoes! A good product manager, should be able to experience the problem first hand, before setting out to create a solution for it.
- Analyze : Take stock of your emotions and figure out exactly how the problem makes you feel. This will help you gauge the exact areas, which you need to solve for.
- List out the problems : Rank the problems from most crucial to solve, to least crucial to solve. Use a framework like CIRCLE or RICE or whatever catches your fancy. More on that later.
- Pretend Launch : Go to Canva or Crello and create an ad of your pretend invented product. Emphasize on what you would tell the world, to make them buy your product. This will reveal the viability, feasibility and attractiveness of your product to consumers.
- Mockup : This is where you create the product. Use Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, Balsamiq or any tool of your choice to create a product mockup. More on that later too.
How to validate your product?
Lets use it! Show your product/wireframes/interactive mockups to people who are facing this issue, and observe them! The proof of the pudding is in the eating! Analyse the following –
1. What delights them : What do they find simply delightful. These re the features you should prioritise for your MVP, based on effort and cost, as in your chosen prioritisation framework.
2. What they find useful : These are the features that you should add to your backlog for development later in the sprint. What is that exactly? More on that later too.
3. What they ignore : These features should be deprioritised for the present, and should be revisited later.
Once your product or MVP is validated, we can move on to Part 3 of this How to be a Product Manager series, which is, How to build your product! Stay tuned, for individual articles, on all the highlighted words in this article. (Neat, ain’t it?)