Optimize your leads management process for Product Management

How to create outlook signature

so today I want to cover me only to ask the product manager which is like the core or the meats if you will talking about priorities covering part of delivery but how do you manage those at scale so it happened to me like when I'm editing like smaller teams of people versus larger team of people it's totally a different picture when you think about managing is covering delivery overall so I want to touch base on this to it as we go so how to do the product at scale so as I started it's very different when you have a small team as start shipping products versus when you have a huge team and by huge I mean let's say 200 as the largest amount worked globally by dispersed and trying to pull it out so when you switch to this bigger teams it sound it seems to me more like you need to apply these startup rules even though if you're like in a global organization like UI it's very different like from the operational standpoint on how to engage team how to make it how to execute and how to make a product now from conception to delivery like very effective so in that perspective I think that in order to build a product scale you need first to have a very effective product management organization right so we're going to talk more about that you need to have a great team by far you should have a great culture within the team you need to have a great execution and you need to like use state-of-the-art technology so let's go into product management organization so if you're not in bed for your first version of your product you've launched too late great Ottoman sells right maybe like especially in the corporate world a lot of people want to kind of be like ship the product at the best version possible so we can we can deliver and deploy the clients whereas no product is perfect at the first try it's going to have a lot of bugs depart probably QA is real and effective so probably going to fail several time you the number of iteration or evil all like you haven't solve a customer problem with the first try because you never talk to the customers right so how do you make sure that the product that you build or that first version of the product is the right one right well the only way for you to be sure about that is to have to like build fast you know put it in front of the users and you know get feedback and interact right so what's important here is and this is like a mindset that the corporate was started to kind of like right now is to try embed this you know principles of agile right so agility to you know build fast Belfast in a way you know to get feedback in order to build a better product is you equal and right so and like the work of the first version of that product is called an MVP or Minimum Viable Product which basically helps you validate for your first product hypothesis right without that validation so in order for you to validate that hypothesis you don't need a perfect product you need a minimum amount of effort right with a minimum amount of or effort of development time right so it's less costly so you don't want to spend like a million dollars to find it to realize that you don't need that product and you have to read your reader aid because you want to make it perfect there are a number of methodologies we use Department right so you heard about agile alone uses the most famous why where scrum right it's widely used but you have also combine like stream programming and so on and so forth mainly like companies corporates are trying to switch ledger our overall development and using scrum but the adoption to true agile it's it's a long process so some people especially like if you want to manage like teams of let's say you have 200 scrum teams or 500 company if you have like these global bands have hundreds of scrum teams like whatever dollars you should be right is it scale agile or say right maybe it is for some organization was perfectly fine but for some doesn't wait why doesn't work the problem is that many organizations evolve differently and many teams from different so they have different legacy will come to technology processes mindset team members and so on and so forth so getting like one like framework and just implementing into a team or organization and thinking that will magically work well it doesn't work like all right therefore you see like some organization be like alright we're trying edge Alaura trying save but it doesn't really work so we're gonna fall back to what we know best which is waterfall right so they tried to do like some waterfall development or what a polite project management / product management right and trying to put some agile principles into the mix so you find to have this hybrid you know agile methodology which works for a moment but probably doesn't work that perfectly that you want to have you want to be right Spotify they came up with their own agile model so they they very created one from scratch which works perfect for them so lesson learned here for me is that one size four doesn't feel lost doesn't fit all you should be looking at what's your best methodology for your team and for your organization right try to adjust in the whole ology to your team and overall the organization try to execute it and make sure you do like try to efficiently ship and sense the market and how your product is doing if definite apology allows you to go to the full of product management like product lifecycle in an efficient way then it's good otherwise if any of these like even if you go back if it's like it's not correctly than the cost of the product delivered at scale is going to rise significantly right so it's all a matter of especially to deploy to global organization it's all a matter of call from here right so let's go to the management process in more detail so the product manager or as a party always start with the vision right so the vision kind of inspires the team and sets the tone of where where will you go right so how do you get to the vision or you get to the product vision you start the strategy so strategy is basically the plan on how to achieve that vision and the plan can be like short term mid term or long term eventually like there are a number of elephants elements that feed the strategy which are overall previous learnings from other products or other overall project or engagements that the company had you have conducted number of used a group or stakeholder interviews right oh you have done a certain market research or a competitive or knowledge that you see like all right this is the micro market is going this is what our competition is doing maybe you should change the strategy towards overall vision that we have right so when you define the product strategy basically you'd come up with the list of business use cases where which you think that your products are tackle and you start prioritizing your use case is what's important for your company right then you jump into the objectives and key results like are you familiar with okay ours yes all right so okay ours is a very important topic because companies like so it was if anybody Intel are paralyzed by Google and a lot of like number of tech companies globally a use it widely within the organization so basically helps you helps your organization product and team align on all the objectives on a quarterly basis most commonly right so and then the end of the product are you come up with kind of a high-level roadmap when it comes to those business use cases of what's important for you to be able to shorten mid term or long term from the business standpoint the next stepping into the product process is you start with prayer discovery so prayer discoveries it's like identifying what to build right so you have a number of business cases and now you're gonna be like alright so where do we start so we started discovery process which usually starts with a user research and ends with a detailed product roadmap for a number of iterations or sprints right so usually here the main and we're gonna go a little bit of more detail later on what further discovery means but the goal of the product is Congress is to like vlog the product or what you're building and come up with the number of product releases right in order for you to be agile these releases needs to be very effective from a product standpoint it shouldn't be documented a lot of requirements so if anyone's gonna be this analyst if you know about the BAS they used to write this product requirement document or er DS or PR DS or business requirement documentation which is like a hundred page document which probably very few people understood and it took like a lot of time and effort to come up with that now the problem is that while you write the document it's the market changes so unless you write rode like a number of light features build those features message you the users get that spear back and you know learn from that experience then it's easier for you to write the next batch of requirements and therefore you like more agile so you adapt to the market changes but in the same time you don't waste time and effort in this process so after Perl discovery got the product delivery right probably leave is about building software and ship incremental software pieces all right so probably liver is about shipping software in incremental way right so in agile or scrum so we have sprints where every iteration which usually is two weeks you ship a portion on a piece of working software you end up with five deployments or once you build your product you start deploy to the clients or an organization or to your users right here what you do is during deployment kind of come up with feedback of how the user are using the product have you solved this problem or that the user have had in the beginning so and then you start testing your hypothesis right you do that with feedback customer surveys and you track metrics so anything related to what what the definition of the assessment all the success in the beginning right so when you define success you has a number of metrics that are important for you for the business standpoint and products in point and based off of that you learn how the deployment is going wrong now here there are two things based on this feedback that you get from the deployment you need to go and revise the product strategy because you learn something new or the overall vision which is rarely happen usually because vision is very holistic and very high level but it happens right so at this point it's important to minimize the output and maximize the outcome and impact and what do I mean by that so before I move on is there any question here so far all good clear so all combat is output so output is more about what you did right in terms of deliverables I created a number like this number of design or UX design screens I call it a thousand line of code right I I wrote this this number of user stories or future sell right so it's more about like the work product that your team does but how does it help you with the product overall like how does it tell if the probably successful or not well it doesn't because even if you wrote like a million lines of code doesn't mean that the program is successful what actually successful is the outcome or like what the business impact of the product how it is affecting the users how are those business metrics you know reacting and is it beneficial for overall organization if the product is deployed successful right so a lot of teams what I've seen is they tend to measure the output this is what we did right this has a number of screens this is the code awesome Qadri roads user stories are great quality look at this prototype is awesome it's clickable and it's kind of shows you like like the real product without building it so it's great yes but it doesn't tell me about how the product is impacting my user base right so it's important to focus on the outcome of the business impact of the product and to measure them rather than focusing on the outputs of the team all right this is why this is important so going back to the product management process these are the main activities that you see are doing per discovery delivery and deployment right so as I mentioned you you start with customer discovery basically tells you like who the users are what problem we are trying to solve and how you're going to tackle so overall like the product right and how is that aligned to your strategy into a bid to your vision right then once you define that you studies exercise with basic feature decomposition you start writing the features up there's this technique defined by Jeff pattern which is story mapping or use a story mapping are you familiar with that so you just story mapping is a very I think effective technique to document stories so Jeff patters it as a book around you the story mapping so if you google it it's a great book if you want to be like a hands-on product manager you should read up because it's one of the best ways to document features and engage all stakeholders in the product environment right so once you get the feature set and that feature set will serve you to do like the first pass of feature prioritization so think of it as the business will come to you and be like when can we get this feature done by and then you haven't read in you haven't read in any user stories or any technical designs you have no nothing but still you need to come up with a sense of delivery timeframe so what we do is basically we come up with like a percent confidence roadmap where we do some t-shirt sizing in terms of like Oh picture size of engineering of course and we come and we use a story map story map exercise to slice out the releases and you know continue and kind of give a fifty percent confidence estimation on when the feature can be delivered so like the story map is a great way to visualize all the features as well as slice up the releases and it will help engineering as well as all the products sake holders to have a discussion around what can be delivered by what like as a first conversation then what we do is you get that feature set and you hand it over to the digital to the design team because think of it as one feature set from a UX perspective or user experience perspective can be dealing is deployed in 100 different ways right so when you write like features their user stories like when a products this money shouldn't be a focusing on how it you look like on the screen but you should merely capture and capture the functionality where is the role of the UX designers or UI designers is to get that feature set and make it as intuitive as possible from a UX than point all right afternoon XPS design you can do prototyping so you can usability testing you can start early testing with the users without actually coding it it's a it's a better way to start testing your product I pas this is because it's cheaper so if you want to change something on your product you just change the color or the button from one is take some minutes whereas if you have already coded it it takes more and it's like engineering kind as well involve which is pretty expensive once you prototyping you go to the technical design so basically you start writing user stories you know as the product manager you should be writing user stories and acceptance criteria gathers user stories and go with the engineering in this what we call like grooming sessions so basically you work with engineers to come up with technical tasks for each of the user stories and based off of their you go into sizing those user stories and come up with a release definition and the detail product roadmap so at this point you coming up with a backlog of a backlog of like three to four iterations or Sprint's so it will enable it to have enough work for engineering to to start working on and the same time you can start working on the next batch of user stories so product delivery when you jump to product delivery so there's this concept of this dual track agile and you want familiar with this concept so if you'll track agile it's when you split the team like the product team into two tracks right in parallel so one track is focused on sensing the market and talking to the users whereas the other track or the other part of the team focuses on delivering those features right we're gonna jump more in detail with dual tracker jellies so basically you have continued discovery so discovery work doesn't end where for a discovery ends as a phase but continuous throughout and then you kick off delivery so basically start building software right that include release delivery quality assurance and testing prong deployment is about measuring and monitoring post release right training communication and product support which is pretty common concepts any questions here so far awesome all clear nobody understood anything so in Guild wreckage aisle you have two parallel trucks so the best way to see this is that you have the product manager and the design team and the researchers trying to understand how the market is behaving or their user base on your like iterations and your product adding new opportunities ideas or problems right log everything that's happening from the requirement opportunity standpoint deletes any opportunity by everything like you log everything if anything is not relevant so you kind of keep sanitizing your product backlog and you come up with this release backlog so when you think about releases you'd be like all right so this is what we learned from the previous release software now like we're gonna change the backlog and this is what you're going to build now so that's why keeping a very short backlog in the beginning like three to four iterations right which is basically like maximum of eight weeks right worth of development work allows you to make these changes as you go and if you see here we have this larger loops and you have smaller loops because processes are different you have a number of processes happening during product discovery which is related to user research design usability testing or overall you know testing as well as you have like proximity product manager when we come market trends and like competition competitor knowledge and so on and so forth we're on the delivery track it's more the loops are like kind of iterations which are a fine number of whips in a sprint usually it goes from one to four weeks it depends on the team ideal is two weeks I've seen star abused while one-week sprints because startups by nature they grow every week so as I start if you don't grow every week that means that you're gonna be out of the market soon where is it more like stable organization it's two to sometimes two sometimes four weeks to the four weeks ago what's important here is that when you start the first original delivery track you initially have a potentially releasable software that in the next spring you go towards a full release or manual release it depends where you're in cycle as you ship out there's this build measure learn loop which is like coined by Eric Ries the you know this book a startup way which basically when you build a product you measure the impact to learn from you believe yeah well it's basically the build measure learn loop it's kind of coined overall in this dual track ajar so the first trek will help you learn and measure and the second track will help you build how to enable it I thought about this question so structure your product in to foster an efficient two-way communication between two trucks so usually you're gonna have the product manager who's like basically overarching like over are is like oversees everything but he's gonna be the product manager he or she is gonna be more on that on the discovery truck whereas the product associated or a scrum master will help with the delivery truck from a product standpoint so usually what I've done is I've cut myself more working with designers and leading engineers and business stakeholders on like what's coming next on the product release whereas a product sociate which actually the scrum master was entitled writing the user stories and managing the Sprinter what's next is like test automation so make sure that you have automated testing as part of your development practices manual testing gives a lot of effort so I've seen both automating testing and manual testing being implemented and manual testing it's basing a lot of manual work which it's not that great but when you start like actually coding you need to make sure that at least 80% of your code base is covered by like unit tests so this is critical about testing overall because once you start deploying new code or new releases into the new production environment you're going to always start breaking other stuff and in order for you to check what you broke what you broke unit tests like will help you in the process overall however send unit test is like a lot of work for the engineers so basically you need to these impacts over all the product delivery timeline because it's kind of like one-to-one based on the engineering practices so if you like put a sprint for like coding you need another spring just to write unit Testament like hundred percent it's usually well let's talk about team so the second point is you'd have a great team you know to build a great product scale and what do you think about the team I think about this so I was reading I was hearing this podcast from raid off my master of scale and his his suggestion was what anything about the team you should be the hero of your own story so think of it as all your teammates everybody needs to have a story to tell right and in that story there should be their heroes themselves so if I'm a p.m. I should all my work if I'm an engineer I should have my story of what do i what I did in the product this serves as a great motivation and team management from you know from the product manager standpoint if you have a team of heroes then you can build great products you should work with the best to build product at scale like many other engineers don't build great products like that's a fact you cannot do anything about it so questions to ask about your team like are they smart usually like when I'm like working with my cooler so every time I work with code words are smarter than me I was I felt more motivated because I wanted to kind of it felt like a competition with it like a healthy competition right I'll be patient about the work usually passion drives creativity right do they get these things done do they talk about things or delegate you see a lot of delegation happening because people want to be managers well they forget about well you lost like two weeks in delegating where you could have done this in a day if you just get it done and get over it right do they leave their ego outside the office so sometimes like a faulty coworker is like cancer in the team its press really fast it will ruin your entire team especially team small impact of a faulty coworker in a small team is huge you can kill the entire team for startups you will kill the star the entire company do they care about team team members caring is great because you cannot hide it if you are fortunately don't care in a small team again the impact is huge and the last thing is do they grow fast professionally this is like oxygen to the team professional growth if someone like Devon I'm working with another product manager has done something great of a p.m. standpoint I'll be eager to get that too so I would grow with the person eventually right if you have a great engineers as done or as done as wrote a reading a great code you will learn from that engineering and your code rules better so like affects the entire team overall so the product manager really is a leader without authority is responsible for everything that happens with a product so if the engineering built a feature incorrectly that's product managers fault at the end of the day like it's not like you don't give me like yeah but that engineer did it's not my fault it's your fault regardless that's why I need to be internally like very connected with your team the product model participates in all product management activities but does not lead it off so there is concept about that all the PM should just do PM job like manage from ceremonies but like the UX researcher will take care of the UX research designs on the design and engineering of the engineering activities that's to me that's not true like the product manager engineering design should be the trial that they should be in every single process throughout but as leaders in each phase of the discovery and delivery process you can have different leaders right so for this one let's say customer discovery the UX researcher will lead but other team members will be part of that activity right and someone in software for the other for the other activities in the product delivery same goes for in discovery same goes for product delivery right whatever what release Quality Assurance and testing we have leaders for every peach activities but other team members of the product it should be aware of what's happening and should choose to get involved in any level of details they need to and contribute right because they can bring it inside to the process and it's good that engineering knows about the PM process design process and also like they they alert they they hear how the user react to their product it's very important to get at the inside directly rather than filtered through the PM or other team members so next thing is culture this to me is very important because as Peter Drucker says culture eats strategy for breakfast so you can strategize as long as you want if you don't have the right team culture it will kill the entire team or product it's unbelievable I've seen so many times where the people with the wrong mindset jump into the new team with a totally different mindset and try to do things that way and all of a sudden I like how come this doesn't work like I did everything possible but something is not working well guess what like if you're a consultant we have one mindset you cannot just go to a tech company and be successful just like on day one first you need to be like alright how is everybody around me thinking what's their perspective and how should I craft the message to adjust the person mindset and to the person's perspective it's very important especially as a p.m. you work with business design engineers testers DevOps QA managers all people from different backgrounds from different mindsets you didn't make sure that you understand everybody's language how everybody thinks and perceive things a lot of people think about purpose when they build a product like race is going over all like why am i doing this have you ever gotten this feeling so when I was working for the Prime Minister so I was involved in a number of you know telecommunication and eat government projects which impacted the entire country and the entire population and basically set the pace for other like initiatives to come after that talking about let's say 3G 4G rollouts a number of like eat government and products and systems that automated a lot of public services that are still in use today and will never like go away that sense of purpose that the impact you're going to make my justified all the hard hardship in the work and one thing is to have purpose of where it is going second thing is is my manager evaluating my effort does he or she like recognize what I'm doing if it does and you have a great purpose of where it is going it's key to kind of have the like great culture in your team that everybody will stick around as one like honey purse and emotional intelligence so when I think about emotional intelligence about being empathetic self-aware and recognizing people around you so my previous boss used to say that if I have to look at all the negative traits that my co-workers have that I wouldn't I would have been left with no co-workers like nobody's perfect you need to understand others people feeling like empathy is key myself I need to like be grateful to everybody you're working with all the time and help them grow with you trust I think it's one of the core traits to have a great culture so Trust I think is twofold for first is from your side you need to build trust with your managers all you need to deliver you'll be humble and you be respectful our team members I need to like contribute to the team regardless like we'd have this goal to help to make the team grow and have a good purpose behind it once you deliver your results and that this sense that you as a person help other people grow with you but the you know best of the team overall then you're going to gain trust for him from your leadership with your managers and then persuade what you expect is that have your back because things definitely will go awry in a way things will go wrong but situation doesn't it doesn't define you if your product will fail doesn't mean you are a failure and the leadership should know that right the situation doesn't define you you'll fail and fail a fail until you succeed a well because this Hound market reacts there are a lot of factors like especially the startup world is more common because failures like 99 percent of startups fail so we celebrate failure in start world right I'm saying we because I'm not anymore there but eventually when I was but he helped us learn a lot and then you know kept us trying in terms of like all right so what's the next projects and whatever we learn from our previous experience so we can succeed so in order for you to do that in a corporate environment you'd have leadership you know back let me stop you back basically so a great work environment keep the talent inside so it's one thing hiring the best another thing keeping the best these are the best people have a lot of options especially in countries like United States right one of our unit is you get pink markers every day there are so many things you can do in different like industries as well in order for you to keep the talent besides create a culture of experimentation so people can experiment fail fast and learn from that and this will enable them to grow as well as test different ways on how to build stuff give credit to the team who the wins not blame the individual for losses show that you care and actually mean it and grow professionally continuously like professional girls to me is like oxygen to the team overall like things change very fast today new skills are required for you to have special as the PM you understand design engineering research testing market competition there are a lot of skills you should have as a PA growing professionals should be like your number one priority should all like every day learn something you like I never felt like I knew I know everything ever like every time I talk to a product manager I felt like oh there's so many things I don't know so I think I should read that what's the next book I should read what's the next thing I should learn solving our business problem drive professional grower motivation this is something that I learned from practice when I became a government executives I had probably one of the toughest problems in the country to solve Venis well in myself I saw it is the team of course but what I realized is this first pressure exposes your real mindset we're under pressure like your urge no matter how good you think you are as long as the first time you are under pressure your real you is going to come out like how many percent like exposing your real mindset this serves as kind of like a feedback loop for yourself to kind of understand yourself improved so I think it's like the best way to improve if you're under pressure exposed yourself to complexity is the first way to grow so hospital art misses problems you're gonna love to talk in two years I was involved with telecom regulation and telecom policy I learned as much as a person that had were in the same industry for 20 years for the past 20 years why because I was like operating at the executive level as the sorry executive level and on daily basis and that's it complexity brings you a lot of insights skills and knowledge so try to solve hard business problems with your product anybody can do the easy stuff anybody you're not going to be competitive if you have products that are easy to build and solve problems that well are easy to be solved and this is where also a lot of startups been back to Star Wars it depreciates and so startups usually solve hard business problems because first they motivate the team and second the competition will drop significantly so let's talk about execution the product manager has five jobs so basically you said the vision and strategy you evangelize about the products internally and with other stakeholders you plan and execute the product while the product life cycle hiring manage anybody is hired or fired anyone so P management one key thing I've noted is that you give our ownership and hold the team member accountable they will think and act differently even personally as long as you'll be like you in charge come with me all the results all of a sudden you feel like oh I don't have anyone to rely on now I'm responsible and I'm gonna help encounter before you start thinking differently from day one why can't ever sound if he has a person be like hey so this is what you need to do come back to me I'll give you feedback on your work so you can improve it will not help based on my experience it's the law it's a longer process in like how the person evolves and takes responsibility right so responsibility makes you thinking like differently make sure when you manage your team give them responsibility and hold them accountable they should learn everybody had him should learn from day one the centralized decision-making by empowering the team member with the information this is very hard to do it's easier then it sounds because of the responsibility that you have if you're like a chief product manager and you have like let's say how many people under you and you feel like in power to make a decision because your job is on the line and then by instinct you're gonna make all the decisions for your team that doesn't scale the person who has the information should make the decision if the UX researchers talk to the users and has a certain information he or she should make a decision excuse me on what to be billed next you shouldn't go out to the change of the cheaper type of manager be like hey what is it what should we do here if the engineering things the new technology comes in and you know we need to use that technology because it will give us some market advantage then the engineering lead should take a decision you shouldn't go out the chain again it's very important when you scale I've seen big teams not scaling or having problems of scaling product when you think about the product manager or anyone involved the product team there are two things one is your hands on and an operating you have is operating rhythm that yep like every day or so or you know a certain pattern you do something you deliver something you little or something new you ship a product you talk to a user you check the UX design you give some feedback somewhere they're always an operating within that you operate and the team should be on this rhythm as a whole and it helps actually in agile because once you have the sprint development work which is there with two weeks it helps you in the rhythm and on top of it you have dual track so you have more cycles on top of the herb development work that gives the entire team and to end an operating rhythm which is important for you to to scale overall being hands-on is key like you shouldn't be like oh this is not my job if you can't do it just do it it doesn't matter what's important is to deliver the product that people want and love and you solve the customer problems it doesn't matter it does because in the end everybody would be rewarded like you should win as a team not as individual so lastly it's about technology the very quick here keep updated with the latest technology trends especially in UX UI designs it's key because especially we have a b2c product there are some certain expectations the user have b2b products they're less sensitive on the latest trends and usually if you see b2b products aren't that intuitive overall and I've seen a lot of companies like global companies deliver b2b products which are it seems like we're back in the 90s whereas you see that it's new ad from a startup it's like we're in 2015 or something right that's the future apply ladies technology or product use cases always think about what's upcoming so we have artificial intelligent machine learning intelligent automation use cases try to use latest products algorithms and models for your use cases it's key to get competitive advantage into the market technology should allow your product to scale at par faster than competition alright so the summary in order to build a perfect scale as we said empower your scrum teams to make their own decisions or run independently create a culture which can attract and retain talent and where everybody is allowed to experiment a line teams objected to your product organization objectives using of technically results there's actually a very good book there are multiple books on ok ours just google them it's amazing it's an amazing technique for a team it's harder to implement it's very easy to understand but very hard to implement well it's proven to be very effective and if like Google Facebook or other compete companies are using it widely then why shouldn't you use an effective internal product management organization talking about what's the best methodology to adapt to your team automating engineering processes to enable an efficient you attract agile if it's relevant for your team sometimes you'll track agile is not relevant to your team so don't use it if it's not this is where you come like yourselves in like works for my team and what doesn't take advantage latest technology and uxy design trends and most of all maximize the outcome and minimize the output thing about business impact when you ship your products to the market and to the users so I want to end with this like Jeff Bezos I'm not going to read it but basically it talks about this motivation that is behind on any project you built it's not about money if you build a great product money will come what would motivate reason money is the change you make with your products and the impact you have in the market so thank you for joining I hope is relevant for you