Effortless Invoice Preview for Product Management

Invoice preview for Product Management

now for the product manager after they understand the customer it's all about developing a set of requirements for engineering to build the right product when it comes to developing requirements there's a lot of different ways you can collect requirements the most um uh typical in the industry um for the longest time was requirements documents these 30-page documents that specify what algorithms are going to be what do this look like you might also get something that's uh fairly more simplistic collecting feature requirements on Post-it notes or spreadsheets and some organizations where they're just so Loosey Goosey these requirements might just sit in the CEO's head or maybe sit in the collective heads of the team right but the one that's really taken hold in the last let's say three to five years is in terms of capturing requirements is user stories and here's the thing about user stories it's a really simple way of describing requirements in just everyday language and here's the template for user story as a rle I want this particular goal or desire so I can get this benefit and I'll run to some some some examples for you so one example could be as an a administrator or secretary I want to be able to add delete or change my boss's schedule so that I don't have to use his password or another example as a Facebook user I want to see out of town friends who send status messages in my hometown first so that I can send them a note now here's what's really unique about this uh user story first of all it doesn't describe how the solution works okay and Engineers love that because gosh Engineers just like everyone else they don't like to be told what to do by just stating the problem that needs to be solved you're still empowering the engineers with their own creative license to come up with the ideal solution and then the next thing that's really great about these us US stories is that it's concise it's not a 30-page document so you're not only saving time to write it but you're also helping the team save time by reading something that's a little bit more to the point now once you get all these user stories and collect it in a central collection place you're going to have some challenges um as a PM we call this managing the product backlog so the backlog is a collection of user stories within the user stories you might see some duplicates you might see some user stories where you might not understand what's going on so you'll spend a lot of time trying to clarify um and then finally once you've got that cleaned up you want to prioritize the top user stories that you want the engineers to work on next there's a lot of different ways to prioritize maybe the CEO dictates what gets done maybe it's the VP of engineering or maybe it's the product manager on the other end of the Continuum something that's a little less arbitrary would be to do a full-blown ROI analysis if some of you guys are from Business Schools you can pop out Excel and do your expected impact in terms of a revenue upside or cost savings for a particular feature but usually it's somewhere in between and that in between state is what I'm showing here in the table which is really a a list weighted by different priorities so we call this a prioritization matrix and on the left hand side we have different stories and we just call them story a b and c and for each one of those stories we'll look at different characteristics or criteria we're considering the revenue impact the customer satisfaction and the implementation difficulty and we take a weighted sum or weighted uh multiple of these three different elements to get an overall priority after that Gibs prioritized Engineers are giving marching orders and uh these days in especially with a lean development movement uh engineering Sprints happen in about a two week interval at the end of two weeks there's usually a demo day where the engineers showcase the great things that they've done with a particular user story and then if it meets the acceptance criteria it gets launched and that's the next stage for the product manager is to serve as the launch owner what is launch owner mean well there's a couple of key responsibilities as a launch owner first of all you're responsible for project execution it's about facilitating communication between the different team members the team members can be very large and it can also be very diverse we could have Engineers we could have designers um as you get closer to launch you'll have marketing legal operations Executives you also serve as a primary executive contact a lot of executives are going to be very very curious about where the product lies in terms of ship dates and you as a product manager you're usually the single throat to choke you're the first person they're going to go to to go and get some answers the next thing is that you'll be the primary product contact anytime there's a need for a customer demo the product manager is usually the first person they call um if there's any sort of customer issue with the product they'll call it the product manager or if there's any new requirements or feature requests those will go to the product manager as well and then lastly when it comes to dealing with the Press Your PR team might reach out to Tech crunch to the Wall Street Journal and they'll want to talk to somebody who's a product expert and because product managers are known to be very close and intimate with the product details perhaps some of the technical elements too as well as great communication skills the product manager is usually the point person and the external representative for a particular product or feature some of your key documents as a product manager at this stage is the product FAQ it's usually a short document two to three pages where it describes what it is that's being launched who is it for how does it work why would anybody want it and when is it launching in which regions okay the last stage of the typical PMS responsibility is once the product's been launched evaluating customer feedback there's a lot of different ways you can get feedback about a newly launched product you can get feedback from the sales team you can get feedback from customer support you can get feedback from social media what people are saying about the product from surveys but the thing that's really popular now amongst mobile and web 20o circles is AB testing and it's because now that we've got um applications that are tied into this client server model you can serve up different types of experiences to different segments of your customer population and so the whole idea here is that the primary experience that's the a experience but let's say you wanted to try a new feature a new color a new button you want to serve that as a b experience to a small segment of your overall audience Maybe % 10% and you want to collect some data to see when those people who are on the B experience how does their behavior change in relation to goals that are important for your organization I've got an example for you right here and let's say this is AB test data for a social network they're trying to evaluate changing the upload photo stage from after the signup flow to during the signup flow and you can see see here in the second column that there are different measures that you that they're evaluating they're like okay if we move this up into the signup flow we want to see engagement increase and you see a lot of positive things here for example um the number of users that are posting to The Social Network that's going up by 2% or the number of post total is going up by almost 5% or the number of invites sent to their friends to join The Social Network that's going up by 2% there's a lot of positive things about this feature that's leading to improved engagement but as it's typical for a lot of new features it's never always win-win in fact it can often be like win lose and there's some trade-offs you have to consider in this particular feature while the engagement has improved modestly on the downside the number of users completing sign up has gone down by 133% and so at that point the product manager and one of your key competencies as a product manager ability to make DEC decisions is given this conflicting situation what should you do should do keep the new feature that has great engagement or should revert to the previous feature that doesn't damage sign up as as as much okay this column over here on the uh far right the P value for those of you who have taken statistics you're familiar with uh what P value is all about it's a measure of whether or not the data that we're looking at is that statistically significant or is that Poss possibly just random chance and as long as the P value is lower than 05 that usually signifies that hey you've got a credible signal to base some decisions off of