My notes on Product Management

The mission of product management is to find and help build the right product.

What makes a product right? Two things:

1. It capturing right value from users/market
2. It delivers the right value to users/market

It is indeed the role of entire organization, but Product managers hold the key role which is to be the glue between business, tech and user experience

So, what do they do all day?

An average day for a product manager might include:

• Talking to and meeting with stakeholders, customers, team members
• Learning about the competition, ecosystem trends, industry trends
• Coordinating product / feature launches and releases
• Prioritizing work to meet business objectives, and learning objectives
• Maintaining and promoting the high level vision, roadmap and the backlog
• Communicating to non-engineers about releases, roadmaps, etc.
• Discovery around new features: understand the real problem
• Breaking down requirements and analyzing data to inform product decisions
• Answering questions: “can we do X?”, “what does product do to Y?”
• Being the “voice” of the product in meetings, conferences
• Writing some copy for a marketing effort

My product management principles

• PM = Entrepreneurs | PM need to have vision, focus on organization goals instead of squad goals and delivery timeline, etc. PM need to have clear mission statement on the product they built. Here’s the element of mission statement:

For (target customer)

Who (statement of the need or opportunity)

The (product name) is (product category)

That (key benefit, compelling reason to buy)

Unlike (primary competitive alternative)

Our product (statement of primary differentiation)

• Value > delivery (Plan fulfilment)| As product managers we need to focus on understanding how we can add value more effectively to the team we serve, not on day-to-day execution of the solution, delegate this to expert who have a better understanding of testing processes, team velocity, and estimations, which is Engineering or delivery leads. In other words, product managers need to focus more on product discovery (with the help of UX), the definition of what needs to be done and the overall strategy (with the help of the business), and focus less on the actual delivery of the work required (with the help of tech).
• Squad composition is matters, and need to have have proper structure and autonomy |1 PM + 1 APM (Helping on the operation side of product management), 1 UX designers, 5 Engineers, 2 QA
• Async > Sync alignment |
• Release need to be frequent, Fail fast → Learn fast → Improve fast, Failure recovery > Failure avoidance
• Customer centric, Customer is our Northstar |
• A lot of Experiment + Post mortem learning |

Alignment within product team

• Quarter OKR roadmap meeting
• Bi-weekly product meeting | Sharing what we’re learn from user testing session, competitor benchmark, customer advisory board, AB testing experiment, CS, industry events, etc
• Bi-weekly 1:1 with PMs | To gather on personal feeling and think
• Bi-daily async product updates| What we’re shipping, any bottleneck
• Monthly retrospectives |Regular roadmap review, How are our products performing? What did we release last month and how is that release doing? What are our customers saying, thinking and feeling? Product retrospectives are explicitly not about the team or process improvements
• + Ad hoc discussion

Product Development Process (Learn → Develop → Release)

Learn — How to build customer driven product management

• Setting up biweekly user testing session
• Exposure hours metrics, “How many hours did you spend with customers this week?
• Establish a customer advisory board | 11-person panel is composed of some of Alpha’s most forward-thinking and active users, have a monthly catchup
• Join industry events → exposes them to a number of important conversations and enables them to connect with your target personas

“If you’re not talking to customers, there’s no way that you can do the ‘why’ part. Data is not going to give you the answer. Data will give you a signal of the questions to ask customers, but it’s not going to give you the answers.”

Develop — How to develop the right way to building products

1. Prioritization
2. Well written PRD: The why, measurement metrics, UX design, Acceptance criteria using Gerkin method
3. Scrum ritual

• 3 pillars of scrums: Transparency, Adaptation and Inspection
• 4 event os scrum: Sprint Planning — 4 hours, Daily Scrum — 15 minutes / day, Sprint Review — 2 hours, Sprint Retrospective — 1.5 hours

Release — Release Management Process

• Internal team need to try
• Release should be easy dan often (bi-weekly)
• using toggle
• Roll out gradually
• Process: Circulate release plan 2 weeks prior with schedule and release checklist→ Real time updates on progress → Internal + Product testing → Alpha release for all teams → Roll out release (x% to x%)

Others — Toyota improvement kata

• Problem
• Definition of awesome
• Next target condition
• Action items