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Bill layout for Product Management

hi everyone and welcome to another video my name is Pat and today I want to help you if you're wanting to dive into product management but you're not actually sure if it's the right role for you if you're even supposed to or meant to be a product manager if it's something that you might like want to do or you're just completely overwhelmed by what a product manager does all day all of these things will be covered in this video so watch this video until the very end it's going to help you a lot and I've divided it into different categories and sections they are building up on one another but feel free to just jump around as well if it's something you know you've already know about or it doesn't really interest you I've added all of the chapters in the description box so you can just jump around and pick the chapter on topics that are right for you now before we dive into the video let's hear a word from our sponsor this video is actually sponsored by me at the event that I'm hosting in August it's going to be an interactive completely remote online Workshop about how to get into of product management so if you're someone who's a little bit overwhelmed by everything to do with product and really how to break into it how to get your first experience how to approach job search then this Workshop is going to be for you it's going to be interactive you're going to be able to exchange experiences with other people who are at the workshop you're going to do some activities and you're going to be able to ask me lots of questions so I can support you on your journey as best as possible and yeah if this sounds like something that could be helpful for you you can click the link in the description below it's going to have a lot more details about the workshop and the agenda and when it's going to take place and yeah I really look forward to seeing you at the event and now without further Ado let's dive back into the video okay so let's get into the video and Dive Right In so the first time I dove into product management was about five and a half years ago I actually studied product management at University and it was a university where we work on projects so you get kind of thrown right into it and you just get to doing you learn less Theory it's more about just just working on some projects right away so I remember I set up my team I kind of had an idea for this nutrition app that I wanted to build to help people with nutritional intolero like food intolerances and I had my team I had some Engineers I had a designer and then we were about five five of us and then I remember we were sitting in this meeting room we're like okay now let's get started let's build this product and I just remember sitting there like oh uh I actually have no clue what I'm supposed to do now as a product manager I have this team but like where do I even start what am I supposed to do and it was at this time that yeah my journey began it was a very messy one in the beginning but it became clearer and clearer as time went on and I learned so many different things like I worked in a bunch of different companies which you'll hear about a little bit later as well and yeah I think product management is just something that it does take a while for the puzzle pieces to fit together but once they do oh my God it makes sense and oh my God is it so much easier to actually do your job obviously as a big disclaimer product management is not an easy role it really is it does require a lot of different skills and a lot of different mindsets and you know being flexible and open-minded and we're going to dive more into that but that's just something that you should know up front it's not an easy job okay and this brings us into the first part of this video which is all about the product management mindset and first of all we're going to talk about these core skills of a product manager now there are going to be a lot and don't get overwhelmed because I know that there's so many different skills that I'm gonna mention just know up front that you don't need to be an ex but all of these things just to get started you need to know a little bit about everything but you don't need to dive deep into any of it that's going to come over time and I feel like I'm still nowhere near being an expert in any of these fields but I'm getting close to you know picking out several topics that I'm getting a little bit better at than other product managers and then other people might be better at different things again so you know it's more about getting good at everything first or getting average at everything and then diving deep so I've also divided this into core skills of a product manager which I've learned that you know it would be great to know as a product manager and also transferable or soft skills which it can really take from any other job so this can come from you know your previous work experiences no matter what you did so let's go into the core skills of product management first okay so the first mindset or the first skill that a product manager needs to know is to have a user-centric mindset and to know how to do user research and to know and really really know how to put the customer first and really learn about their problems and spot problems I think this is one of the most important things because ultimately what you're doing as a product manager is you're building a product that solves a problem for someone and if you don't have that and you don't really have a feeling for that it's going to be very hard to build a successful product so learn about all the things like user research you know how would you go about interviewing people how do you go about spotting problems and we're going to go into a process later on that's going to help you a little bit on on how to do that but yeah I think this is one of the most important things is the user-centric mindset that's what every product manager needs to know then number two is the design thinking process this is a process that the product manager will have to go through pretty much when they're building any sort of feature or any sort of new product and it can really help you as a starting point or even just like going forward through every role that you're doing to have this framework in the back of your mind and we'll cover it in a little bit more detail later on the next skill is qualitative and quantitative data Gathering so knowing how to collect qualitative data which is more things that come from you know the customers like customer service people that you're working with that straight from the customer it could be via interviews for example it could be by a surveys it could even be like market research it could be reading app store reviews it could be like emails that customers send you all of these things are qualitative forms of data and you need to know how to gather that on the other hand we also have quantitative data so this includes things like website visitors conversion rates you know how many people have bought your product all of these sort of things which are more like numbers focused and focused on a larger group of people so you need to have a grasp of both sorts of data collect like methods of collecting data because both of these will inform you in different ways and will help you to shape the product and make important product decisions the next thing you need to know is about the base six of agile and scrum so these are obviously if you're working in a modern organization most organizations work with some sort of agile you know with an agile mindset or like they work with scrum potentially or kanban different sort of Frameworks and I know these might be buzzwords for you if you're completely new to this but there are also a lot of resources that you can check out about this but knowing the basics of this will be very very very helpful as most people and most companies work with those nowadays then the next thing you need to know as a product manager is to have a basic understanding of tech so you don't need to be able to code perfectly you don't need to know everything that your engineers that you're working with are doing but you do need to have a basic understanding of how a release works for example you know how people might work with GitHub you know if they're putting things on staging and then production like the whole kind of life cycle development life cycle and understanding each stage and why you're doing these certain things and also needing like you also probably need a basic understanding of you know what is the back end what is the front like what do back-end Engineers do what do front-end Engineers do and like roughly of how long things typically might take Engineers to do obviously you know you will not be able to estimate anything in great detail even Engineers don't know that but you just need to know a basic understanding of that and I think what can help is working on your own project for example like I coded a Blog and that really helped me to understand at least some of what Engineers work involves day to day and also then just once you get a job as a product manager just becoming curious and talking to Engineers that you're working with asking them even stupid questions all of these things will help you to get a better Tech understanding but in the beginning you don't need to be an expert you just need to have a basic understanding but again it also depends on the product so some products might be a little bit more Technical and if you're not so technical yet and then this might not be the first role that you go for as a product manager the next thing that you need to know about is the basics of marketing so a lot of the product is about how to get it out to the real world to customers to clients so you need to know about what funnels are what conversion rates are how to drive maybe some basic information of how to drive website traffic and how to measure that all of these things like Basic Marketing terms are really good for you to know and understand but again you don't need to be an expert then the next thing you need to know is the basics of ux or user experience you need to know what examples of good ux are and what bad ux is and you need to be able to spot that in different products for example a very slow website speed is bad user experience because users are going to get frustrated and they will leave your website and never come back probably so having a good understanding of what that is will help you to first of all work with the design on your team and it will help you with testing you know spotting errors and spotting of how you can improve the product so having a good understanding of ux I feel like is essential for a product manager and the last thing you need to know in terms of core skills is a basic business understanding you're going to work as a product manager your job is to not only solve a problem for the customer your job is also to make sure that it somehow makes a profit for the business that you're working with and that it doesn't just you know that it makes money somehow the product this is not the case of course in all products I mean there are certain products which are internal products that are not making money or community-based products which maybe make money in other areas but it still does help to have a good business sense because you're going to most likely as a product manager be dealing with business people and business stakeholders so having sense of business and knowing what's important in business and and really appreciating that can help you to go a long way as a product manager alrighty let's dive into transferable skills that you can literally bring from any other job that will also teach you some of these skills so these are not Tech technical or hard skills they are called soft skills and anyone can really pick them up so for product managers I think key is obviously communication being able to talk to people and clearly State your point and what you're trying to bring across then prioritization being able to really put one thing in front of another and knowing why you're prioritizing one feature over another along with that also comes saying no I think that's a very very important skill to have as a product manager is being able to say no and saying no to a bunch of different kinds of people being able to think creatively and outside of the box coming up with different solutions that other people might not think of right away being open-minded and adaptable being open for Change and being okay if things you know change from one day to the next or your day will start out one way and then it will completely end in a different kind of way and being able to being okay with you know pivoting your product changing the direction of your product if it is necessary then enjoying experimentation pretty much what you're doing as a product manager all day is experimenting you're testing out different things you're testing out hypotheses validating those invalidating those we'll get to that a little bit later but this is what you're doing all day as a product manager so if you don't enjoy experimenting it might not be the right thing for you being able to be a leader so you need to have some leadership skill skills and being able to motivate a team to be able to work well with a team to be able to identify strengths of different people in your team and really just becoming like being a somewhat of a positive role model even in the team because this will really inspire people this will get them to to work on stuff with you and to be excited to work together with you and that's what you need if you want to build a successful product also curiosity if you're curious a lot about a lot of different things and you like to ask questions you like to understand how things work you really like to get to the bottom of things this can also really help you as a product manager and really build our products that are kind of going a bit more in depth and really helping solve problems and then problem solving and identifying those problems I think this is also crucial so if you're good at spotting little problems in your day-to-day and you kind of can identify those and maybe come up with some ways of how to solve those problems then you might be a really really good product manager and this is a skill to really work on and develop as you go on so these are some of the transferable skills and really I think you you again like with the other skills you don't need to be an expert at every little single thing but it does help if you're strong at a couple of those things because that means you really will become a really good product manager and it does make your job a lot easier why and how product management is different in every company so as a product manager you're not going to do the same things in all companies that you work in your role is going to vary drastically depending on the stage of the company how many people are there like they're the clarity of their vision and then their business model your seniority the type of product that you're working with all of these different factors and a lot more will have to do a lot with how and like how your role is as a product manager so just become aware of that and I think just knowing what's important for you can help you to go a long way so for example you know if you're a product manager at Google it is a huge company and they have a huge product so you're going to work with a lot of different other product managers a lot of stakeholders there's a lot of layers within the organization that you have to keep in mind and when you build a new feature for example like say you want to add a certain button let's just keep it simple say you want to add a button in Google um you can't just do that you can't just try that out you can't just say hey like talk to the designer and be like hey let's design a button and put it in there you are really going to have to explain why you're going to have to share a lot of data you're going to have to analyze it like just putting a simple tiny little button somewhere on Google is going to take a lot of like talking to a lot of different people maybe even hundreds of people maybe not that many but it's going to take convincing a lot of people that you're allowed to do that so your role there is going to be a lot of you know writing out like documentation writing out why you want to do certain things like writing out the reasons why having very many meetings with like a lot of different types of stakeholders collecting a lot of data it's going to take a long time for you to build certain products um I mean I have never worked at Google so I don't know the exact way they build products but I can imagine that's something like what it would be like um in a bit in a bigger company at least and now if we go to take the example of a startup if you're working in a startup you're going to work a lot faster obviously because the startup has most likely not reached product Market fit which means that you don't have a fit yet with the market and the people and the product and solution that you're building so you're still trying to find that which means you need to work and like do a lot of different experiments in a fast fast way so that you can learn and so that you can fight as fast as possible build a product that actually solves a real problem and and has like and is a proper solution for your customer so in that case you're going to be doing a lot more you know testing and trialing so you might be one week you might have an idea you will quickly talk to maybe the CEO of the company they'll be like oh great idea let's try that you'll maybe talk to some other people in your team get some feedback you will combine that with some customer feedback that you have gathered over the past couple of weeks and you will use that to then design quickly design a button say for example in the product and then test it and ship it right away and this can happen in a matter of a week or even a day like depending on how fast the startup works but this will be a lot more you know trial and error it will be a lot more messy it will be a lot more speedy and it will probably take talking to a lot less people than if you're working the bigger company so yeah obviously there's a lot of nuances and it really does depend on the company I've also seen bigger companies where you can just try things out and it can happen really fast I've also seen smaller startups where you're not allowed to do anything as a product manager pretty much but I think just being aware of of the different nuances and levels and different kinds of tasks that you'll be doing as a product manager can really help you when you're looking for a role and when you're trying to get clarity on on which kind of product role you want to pursue how learning the design thinking process made me a better product manager so if you remember at the beginning of the video how I told you about me sitting in this room with all of the teammates that I was going to build a product with well if I had known the design thinking process I would know exactly what to do at least I would have a nice guideline of where to go and what to do next so knowing this and learning this has helped me so so much in actually becoming a better product manager knowing what I should be doing day in and day out the design thinking process you can learn a lot more about the history I'll include some links below but I'm just going to go roughly super high level through the different stages and why they really help you to know what to build and and to know what you're doing as a product manager so in design thinking we have the emphasize stage which is about getting to know your customers and the problem that the customer is facing and really diving deep into that then we have the defined stage the defined stage is all about defining which problem specifically within the product or in general you want to help solve and defining like framing it as a as a clear problem statement so you can work with it then you have the idea stage the idea stage is all about coming up with different solutions potential solutions to that problem together with your team and and having it like an ideation session for example then prototype prototype is all about quickly as fast as possible to build a solution to that problem it depends on the stage of your product if you're already an established product this will come in the form of building kind of an MVP we call a minimum viable product of your solution one that will require the least effort to build so we will build that and ship it as fast as possible if you're still starting out it would look like it could be a paper prototype so it could be just like sketches on paper and then presenting that to people and this is where stage five will come in it's about testing and getting it out to real users you get it out either yeah already live live within your product or you test it out you go around to your target group to your customers and you will get them to to test it out and provide feedback to you and this cycle this is a whole cycle so this doesn't end ever it will just keep on going so basically whenever you're building a product you will keep going through the design thinking stages again and again and again for example once you've tested it you've gotten some feedback you might have to go back to the id8 stage because you've realized your solution is crap or you go back to the Prototype stage where you make some tweaks and then test it again and then once it's once it's good and once it really solves the problem that's when you release it or you keep it in the product so this framework oh my God let me tell like it literally helps at any stage of building a product and you're always going to apply that as a product manager that's like literally the core of what you should be doing obviously there's a lot more other things around it but this is like the most important thing is just going through these stages and validating different things testing different things until they work and making the product better in that way so learn design thinking it will really help you it will really help you to get so much clearer about what you're supposed to be doing all day as a PM Now product managers are not project managers I had to put this section because it's very important and some people get it mixed up and you might already know the differences if you've been diving into the product world for a while but maybe you don't so let me just clarify it because a lot of people including my family or just people around me they sometimes think I'm a project manager which can be offensive to a lot of product managers because you're actually doing very different things so here's a little chart that I've pulled up it will hopefully help you to understand a little bit the different tasks that a project manager will do versus what a product manager does but essentially down to the core product managers they work on products so they could be working on a platform for example that sells beauty products and your job as a product manager is to make the platform or like either the whole platform or part of the platform better and to increase the the conversion rate for example to to achieve some sort of business goal and your main tasks are going to be you know running different experiments to to test things out you're going to work with designers to talk to them to figure out how you can make that happen you're going to talk to stakeholders about your ideas you're going to put together strategies and different things initiatives that you work on throughout the year or throughout the quarter to make that happen you're going to a day-to-day work with Engineers to test different things out to trial trial it to you're going to gather you know feedback from the customers you're going to um okay I could go on and on and on so I'm going to stop here but this is what a product manager does now let's go to Project managers project managers typically work on projects hence the name so what they will typically do is they get a project for example we have to run this in this event buy this and this time and you we will have to make sure to deliver it in the most efficient way possible so what a project manager will do is they will make sure everyone's you know clear about the schedule like the timeline everyone knows what they're doing everyone has their tasks assigned they will anticipate several obstacles that might come in the way of you know delivering this thing on time they will talk to different things people communicate like where the Project's at and a bunch of different other things that I'll probably forget but the the main point to mention here is that it's about you're delivering something at a deadline and it's about efficiency and it's about communicating a lot of different things whereas a product manager it's more about the overall you know the big picture the product itself and the vision and and they will also do certain parts of project management while they're for example working day to day on tickets with designers that will have some project management work attached to it but it is not the core of what they're doing so just be aware of that you can dive more into that and and some other videos but I just want you to know that there is a big difference between project managers and product managers don't become a product manager if you so I'm just going to summarize some things that might hold you back from becoming a product manager or that might make you a very unhappy product manager because I think you should not get into this role for the wrong reasons it can be very glamorous sounding and a lot of people might think like wow you know you're building something all day every day but the reality is quite different a lot of the time so I just want you to be aware of that don't become a product manager if you don't like talking to people reality is you're just going to be in meetings a lot of the time you're going to talk to a lot of different people all day every day and you're going to be an active participator in those meetings most of the time so as a product manager it's really rare it's really rare it's rare that you will have a moment where you really just sit back and relax and you can let other people talk a lot of the time you're gonna have to either run the meeting or you're going to have to really actively participate and listen to what people are saying so if you don't like that you probably should not be your product manager you often don't have the final decision making power so if you think that a product manager is like a CEO then you're wrong unfortunately so this is something that I also learned I thought in the beginning I could just do whatever I want as a product manager well no you're going to have a lot of stakeholders you're going to have a lot of different people that are going to be able to make decisions and people who are a lot higher up than you and like investors and you know just other stakeholders in the business that might have a lot more decision making power than you yes ideally you should have the decision making powers in a lot of different areas and like what experiments you run what features you build and what things you try but a lot of the time this is not always the case and so just be aware of that you don't make all the decisions and you make them together with the team you make them together with other people within the company don't become a product manager if you like predictable days your day might start out one way you might have a bunch of different meetings scheduled but then there might be a bug you know the website might crash and you're going to have to fix that you're gonna have to be involved in fixing that you're gonna have to communicate that to a bunch of different people you're gonna have to get your team on on that so uh meetings could be canceled also that can happen all the time or you know suddenly someone will change or pivot or say like we don't need this anymore or now we need this like this can all happen and your days will never be the same like they're not going to be you know all day every day is going to be the same day every day is different and that can be very fun but it can also be very stressful at times so just be aware of that don't become a product manager if you don't like feeling lonely every now and then so I mean no one likes to feel lonely but and this might be a bit of a random one but this is something that I learned is that sometimes you're going to feel a little bit lonely because you're kind of this in-between person between all of the different teams you're not really part of the business teams but you are still talking to them you're not really part of the engineering like all the engineers but you're still like working with them you're not part of all the designers but you're still working with them if you get like where I'm going with this so you are like kind of a bridge between all of these these different areas which can make you feel a little bit lonely at times especially if you're one of the only product managers in the company and you're going to have to wear a lot of different hats and yeah sometimes you just don't really know what to do and where to go next and this is where it can really help you to have people other people in the company that you can talk to but yeah still know that sometimes you might feel a little bit lonely don't become a product manager if you want to do everything in depth and you want to spend a lot of time on one thing you're not going to be able to do that most of the time you will often not have the time to really really really dive into depth into something so you will not have you know you will not be involved in the in-depth marketing strategy of your product you will not be involved in you know the in-depth technical details of your product sometimes you will be more like in the depths of it for for certain areas but a lot of the time you're just gonna have to know like sort of the The Superficial things or like just certain parts of it and you're going to have to leave it to other people to to do the in-depth work your role is more superficial and generalist not superficial that sounded really bad but your role's more of a general generalist role and while you can become an expert in some areas at some point you're most of the time working as a generalist don't become a product manager if you don't like to say no a lot you're gonna have to do that it's something I'm still uncomfortable with I still struggle with that I'm learning how to do that every single day and if you hate saying no if you really can't do it don't become a product manager okay also don't become a product manager if you want to be a CEO I mean I already mentioned this briefly but if you want to be the boss and you want to manage lots of people and you want to be in charge this is not the role for you because you're not going to be in charge you're just going to be obviously in charge of a product and or a certain feature set but you're not going to be ruling the company that's not your job and so just know if you want to become an entrepreneur or a boss or like business owner then product management might not directly be the right role for you you'll still learn a lot of the different skills of an entrepreneur and a business owner but yeah if you're a typical product manager you're not really going to be doing the boss things okay and also now for some final truth talk a lot of the times you're going to want to throw out your computer like out the window thank you foreign a lot probably because sometimes things just don't work the way you expect them to work and this sounds very Grim maybe it sounds a little bit um very sad and frustrating but it's also fun and I think it's also a role where you really learn different so many different things and there's always something new and you're really involved in building something and solving problems if you're approaching it in the right way so it can be very rewarding but just be aware of all these different things that I just mentioned and yeah if you're hearing all of these different things and you're like okay I don't mind I can I think I can deal with that then you're ready to be a product manager okay the last thing that we're going to dive into before we end this drastically long video I think this is one of the most longest videos I've ever done but anyway we're gonna dive into what a week of a product manager might actually look like so I've written down some things that I've done in a previous job like how of week um might have looked like and I'm going to go through it with you so I'm not going to explain every single meeting for that I probably need another video but let me know if this is something you're interested in knowing a bit more about and I can go through maybe some typical meetings that a product manager might have in a week also know that this is not like the case for every type of product manager you know different product managers might do different things this is what my week often looks like so Monday design sync with your designer on a certain feature and brainstorming then business alignment meeting to get buy-in on a certain feature then product demo sharing your product with people in the company writing a feature requirements document Tuesday customer interviews QA testing a feature that you just released and potentially fixing some of the issues together with the engineers writing tickets Wednesday refinement meeting which is where you go through the different tickets and you get Engineers estimations and how long they think things will take and the obstacles in the way retrospective with your team then more QA testing with maybe other people in your team with a QA engineer then Gathering requirements again like you know finding out different things that you need for a feature different information that can happen via slack or any other way then Thursday another business Inc meeting with another person in the company for a new feature that you're working on then a stakeholder meeting with an external stakeholder and presenting a roadmap to other people in the company so people higher up or like management then Friday and another round of customer interviews or user testing anything like that then feature audit so that could be looking at your quantitative data looking how features are performing that you just released then writing more tickets Gathering more requirements like figuring out what else you need to be able to build a feature and having another meeting with your designer to go through another round of designs um before they are then ready to be developed so if you're completely new to product management this might sound like a complete jargon for you and you might be like okay what the hell does this mean um as I mentioned uh feel free to let me know if this is something that's interesting for you where I would literally go through all the types of meetings that you could be having and what you would be doing in those meetings again I'm not speaking for every product manager out there but there's just some of the things that you might be doing as a product manager okay we covered a lot of ground in this video and I will stop it here your head is probably exploding especially if you watch the video from beginning to end if you're still watching amazing good on you thank you so so much for listening to my voice for that long and also yeah if this helped you this video then you might like my workshop which is coming up in mid-august and I'm planning on if it goes well and people like it I'm planning on doing this once a month just to help people to get into product management and to get into it for the right reasons and really just figure out like their next steps and what to do and to to remove some of that overwhelm because I remember just feeling this overwhelm when I first got started and I want to help more people to feel a bit more clarity towards product management and also just feel a bit more confident about approaching this because it actually is a lot more doable than you might think and you might actually have a lot more skills already to become a product manager than you might think so if this video was helpful feel free to check out my Eventbrite link I'll leave it in the description below it is an interactive Workshop it will go for around two hours and it will cover a lot of ground it will cover a lot of different things and and More in um in the two hours and I would love to to work with you there and see you there if not then I hope this video was super helpful enough for you already and it gave you a great idea of what a product manager does what they do what skills they need Etc and yeah I wish you all the best on your product management Journey if you have any questions let me know in the comments below I'm happy to answer them and with that I shall see you in the next video see you bye