Easily Bill MS Word for Product Management with airSlate SignNow

Bill ms word for Product Management

hi everyone my name is liam i'm a product manager at google i was a program manager at microsoft and i've founded a few startups in the past so today we're going to be talking about what technical business and ux skills do product managers need let's dive into it so let's start with a refresher what is a product manager right like let's just go back to the basics quickly and just do a quick recap so a product manager is three parts right you have ux business and engineering and pms are the little purple spot in this diagram that are smack in the middle pms are here and i've had this conversation way too many times right so so this is the conversation that i get with my friends with people that are interested in becoming product managers my linkedin inbox is it goes exactly like this right so so you're saying i need three master's degrees in each category ux business and edge that seems like too much and my reply is like well no not really but you need to know each category pretty well um and then the immediate reply is well liam that doesn't really help me i need specifics how deep do i need to go in each one of these categories to be a very good product manager and that's we're going to talk about today so let's take the next 10 minutes or less ideally less and dive into the technical business and ux skills required to be a great product manager so what technical skills does a pm need let's start with the tech side right you need to know what's possible you need to kind of have a basic understanding of the impact to effort curve in your head so i'd say you need to be able to answer these questions right like how does the internet work at a high level can you diagram it and here's a crude diagram that i just quickly drew up on my ipad of how the internet works when you type in .whatever.com it's going to the wi-fi router which goes to a comcast switch which goes to a dns lookup to convert to an ip address which goes to amazon blah right like something like this go google it you'll find a much better version of this but this is kind of what you're looking for and you should be able to do also an understanding of how deed is stored at a high level right like what are some data types what's a string integer double floating point file types and here's a quick diagram of maybe some types right so i'll be able to to kind of list things out of what's an integer well it's like 10 or 1. it's not like 2.7 right the decimal point there uh what scenario would you use each of these in for example an integer maybe you'd store how many views this video got hopefully it's a lot a double is like a 2.7 2.5 you have a decimal maybe it's at the average star rating for your favorite restaurant google maps a slight bias because i work on that product right but a string right like that that would be my name on that would be your name that's the first name of a user just understanding these concepts and these data types is super important and i've already given you a head start here i would try to understand what an api is right i'm not going to spoil it for you go google it application programming interface what does it look like what does it do why do you need a key to authenticate with an api just a basic understanding of what that is i would also try to understand a few programming languages not how to build with them but what they're used for right like you would not use swift to write an html front-end web page uh you would not use java to write an iphone app right like there's kind of there's specialties for programming languages i would try to see what the top programming languages are i'm going to link below the stack overflow developer survey for 2022. i i forget which year it was that shows the most popular programming languages that developers are using right now i would understand what they're good for what is an app right this is such a hypothetical thing but what is a client what are the trade-offs between web apps versus native apps and i'm giving you again a nice little diagram a little bit of a cheat sheet i keep pointing this direction but it's actually going to be over here so you can see there's a native app you use swift it's downloaded on the device as opposed to a web app which is a cached react maybe html you know type of thing that you just you pull as soon as you type in .x.com they all connect to an api and the api is using some node.js service potentially in the back end right so understanding these concepts and what i'm talking about here is going to be super important and it's easily googleable right so just search on the internet what these words mean if you don't quite understand them read the two first sentences on wikipedia and you're done and finally i'd also try to understand what a server is what what is servers what do they do what is latency how do you build servers right where do you rent them what do they cost right so these are kind of the questions i would be asking and just have that general curiosity for the topics that i just laid out also i'd recommend for the technical side to be able to break down you know with help from your engineering team a problem into smaller high-level solutions right so breaking down problems into smaller things that's very basic thing i would recommend having the ability to own which metrics you're going to track and fully understand the difference between a health metric success metric progress metric whatever it is but my advice and rule of thumb is it's never daily active users that's never your answer don't go after that look for specific metrics that'll actually help you achieve your goals as a product manager metrics are the way you're going to track success and you'll be graded upon those metrics as well so you should really understand how they're calculated and how to calculate them yourself finally always be learning always be curious about technical trends read tech news sites go on stack overflow just look around for answers and questions see the most popular repos on github what's the open source community doing maybe you even take an intro to a computer science course online only do a free one there's a bunch by harvard and stanford great universities that are linked below and like my rule of thumb is don't pay for this stuff there's so much free content like this on the internet you need to understand why a technical decision was made and you can talk to your engineers to learn more about the specifics but you should be able to understand the trade-offs that you made to come to that decision while you don't need to know any programming languages i will say the one thing you should understand is sql or aquarian language that's equivalent to it you need to understand how to get your own data sometimes your data science team your analyst team won't be available you need to be able to query it and get your hands dirty i don't know the expression whatever to figure it out yourself i would also avoid unicorn thoughts right i call them unicorn thoughts i don't know what the right word is but buzzwords don't use ai blockchain ml if you don't know what they mean or they're not actually useful in this context it just looks very bad don't do it and like the diagrams that i've been showing be able to draw those diagrams with some confidence right be able to draw the boxes that point to the other boxes and and see how it all works together you don't need to know the specifics on how each box works but know the diagram and the architecture you can have an opinion on long-term features but i would really say don't have an opinion on specific technologies right your job as a product manager is determine why we're doing it and kind of what we're doing but not how we're going to get there specifically leave that to the engineers they're the experts honestly my rule of thumb is you've gone too far if you're considered to be the best engineer while you're being a product manager i would say you've gone way too technical right so just do what i've outlined here and i think that is more than enough all right so enough with the technical that was the longest section what business skills do you need as a product manager so you need to understand the basics of business economics right what is revenue what are costs what is profit what is ebitda here's a cheat sheet that shows you all of those definitions but you can also google them just knowing these basic definitions and what they do is super important i would also try to understand pricing strategies and monetization right freemium ad supported pay-to-play subscription here a couple notes that i took right like freemium we're thinking clash of clans or after light one of my favorite like photo editing apps ad supported we're thinking instagram it's google search there's ads and that's how they make money pay-to-play that's just a one-time upfront fee like procreate or when you buy like a license of windows and then subscriptions thinking you know netflix spotify things like that where you're paying every month for as long as you use the service you need to understand competition and you need to develop substantial advantages to your product and understand how and why your competitors succeed or failed for example i'm a product manager at google i work on google maps so i'm looking at apple maps i'm looking at bing maps i'm looking at competitors in other countries that's what's really important to me and understanding the landscape of competition also i want to emphasize emotional intelligence it's super critical to being a product manager having a lot of empathy having a lot of eq i'm going to put a youtube video below that summarizes this very well i will do a very bad job of summarizing it but just look into that it's very important to be a great product manager so here are two words that as a product manager you're thrown out a lot especially on the business side is storytelling and writing so do your presentations like each slide have a purpose so does your story have a problem solution landing launching right do you get people excited when you talk about a problem it would look at all of those things to gauge if you're good at storytelling and writing so and honestly i don't know what the exact definition is and i feel like most people just make up the definition but i would look at those as being a gauge of doing good at that you need to be a leader and have the ability to convince others that the problem that you found is worth chasing and it is the biggest of the problems right the influencing without power is by definition being a product manager and it just is a good thing in general to practice you need to understand the marketing message and potential go-to market of your product how are consumers or business people or companies going to take the message of why your product is the best product in the world i would be thinking about the marketing side of things early on and how you're going to position it and honestly this is like really high level kind of buzzwordy stuff like how to position yourself in the market uh you can google it to find better guides on this but just think about like are people going to resonate with what you're saying and what you're producing that's kind of it and again to reiterate where you should be opinionated and where you should kind of back off i would say here you should be very opinionated on the strategy and the long-term vision that is your job as a product manager that's what people are looking to you for in terms of specific skills like legal skills finance the marketing and advertising folks on like buying facebook ads or whatever it is uh they're gonna know best i wouldn't push against them too hard now to what ux and design skills does a product manager need we're almost there we're almost to the end here you should be able to use sketch and probably figma now at a surface level the rule of thumb is if you can make gray boxes look somewhat like an iphone app then i think you're doing fine that's exactly what you need to do i wouldn't go any more high fidelity than that you need to have a basic understanding of terminology in terms of user experience and ui what's a button what's a label what's a text box what's a menu uh again google all these things and in terms of like what does the sketches look like you can either hand draw them you can use boxes on figma but this is kind of the the fidelity level that i think we're looking for here as a product manager this is google maps right it's a search bar and a map being able to understand what a button is a text box a label um a menu right kind of this terminology that's gonna be very helpful but if you can draw this stuff i think you're doing pretty good so i would understand these kind of ux slash design concepts uh again just google them what is an affordance what what is kind of user-centered design what is a critical user journey understanding the concept behind it and the rationale for it super critical but you don't need to go too deep another thing that i see a lot of product managers and just people in general is to ask non-biased questions to people using your product uh right just know how to conduct decent user research um don't push what you want to be right understand what happens kind of the basics of that uh maybe you know you could do some googling to try and figure out what are actual good questions to ask users having a basic understanding of psychology and just focusing on empathy and having empathy for other people and your users and your your partners and your collaborators whoever it may be that's pretty much the definition of being a great product manager is having an incredible amount of empathy i can't stress this enough go look this stuff up and as a great product manager i would suggest not being opinionated on much here great designers will likely know the best way to build something they're going to understand how people work the flows that people go through the buttons that people use whatever it may be the actual execution of that design better than anyone else so i would kind of leave your opinions on the table here you can be opinionated on the requirements uh from the functionality and the feature set but the execution of how that's going to look and manifest i would stay away from that and let your incredible designers do their best work so finally to answer the question of do you need three master's degrees in all three of these categories to be a great product manager the answer is no you just need to watch this video and now i can reply to all of your dms saying well here's the video share with people that are asking the same question we've gone over today the engineering skills the business skills and the ux skills required to be a great product manager and hopefully you found it useful thanks again subscribe share this out to people that are asking the same question and thank you so much for watching today it means so much to me have a great day