Create a Proforma Template Word for Product Management Effortlessly

Proforma template word for Product Management

hi everyone um welcome to this session of the product schools webinar today we'll be reviewing how to write great product requirements so as an introduction my name is ellie newell i'm a senior product manager at amazon i've have about 10 years of experience in the digital space nine of those years has been focused on product management i've worked on internal tools external tools api integrations social and content platforms as well as attribution solutions now i'm currently focused on building out the video offering for the amazon retail site and enough about me um let's get started with why we're all here today um so today we're planning on reviewing uh what a prd is uh product requirements doc they're also known as business requirements doc so you may hear me switch between prd and brd apologies for that um then we'll deep dive into how to write requirements what's included in a requirement what are best practices we'll go through an example and then we'll finish up with what happens after you review a prd so starting off what is a prd the prd itself doesn't touch product opportunity our revenue but instead it's really rooted in use cases and desired functionality this is going to be the compass providing clear guidance on products purpose and providing alignment for your team the prd should include an overview or again the purpose for the release and the functional requirements which i'll get into a bit more later in addition it should spell out any other ways the system or environments should react uh and those are going to be considered non-functional requirements which i'll get into in a bit as well all right why why do we need a prd um the way you should think about it is uh this is kind of like i said the compass or the source of truth for your entire team if it isn't in the prd it won't be included in the release that's the way you should think about it um your team will continue to use this document when they need clarifications or questions and then after the release it's good to revert back if people have disagreements on exactly what they thought was supposed to be released so who should be included in reviewing the brd well you should really include anyone that's working on the project but you also may want to include other stakeholders that may provide great feedback such as other pms your end users if they're internal and other developers this is a great opportunity to really clarify exactly what you're looking to develop and getting that feedback from other people is going to help iron out areas that you may not have considered so when will you need to write these you should consider writing a prd for any new feature without this there's definitely going to be a risk of confusion and there's no log of your intent prior to implementation this comes after you've done your market research and you've built your strategy doc but before the developers start working on the feature so you should really consider this an in-between you've already gotten by buy on from the team that they're interested in doing this you've got funding for it now you're really just getting on paper exactly how you expect it to function you'll want to start in your prd by including the objective why you're proposing the product i know i just mentioned that this is separate from your strategy doc and it absolutely is but i recommend having a short section on top to explain why you're doing this it'll help bring a lot of good focus on the doc in your meeting it'll also help remind people who are working on it why it's so valuable it's always really important to help people understand because it may be top of mind to you but it's not going to be top of mind to everyone that's working on this then you're going to want to move into the requirements which we'll dive into a little later someone spend too much time on that here be sure you include any assumptions about things you expect to be in place such as assuming that all users should have access via specific role or permission and then you'll also want to include dependencies or other items the product will rely on such as services that your team doesn't support remember this is the source of truth so you also want to include links to the strategy doc where you outlined why you should build this product and you'll want to include links to the ux box so developers can have access to the design in the same place that they have access to the product requirements depending on how you manage your workload you'll likely want to link the brd in the project plan or in various tickets it's always good to have it right at the source of where the development is happening all right so you've got it written um how do i recommend that you review it with your team so you're going to want to schedule a review of your document with the entire team depending on how long it is this might be a half hour review this might be an hour review at this stage there's going to be a lot of questions clarifications and challenges coming from the team that should be addressed in the prv if necessary so the goal isn't that you show this and everyone loves it and you walk away um you're definitely going to want to get some constructive feedback from your team to make sure you've considered all of the risks and implications the goal at the end of this is that the prd is thorough and comprehensive enough there are no surprises later on here's how i recommend handling it provide each team member access to the document start the meeting by asking them to review it give them an allotted amount of time to review it leave a section after every section of requirements for notes and open questions when everyone's done reviewing it you should ask for level feedback overall on the doc these shouldn't be intricate questions about the requirements but instead should be any risks or issues people see overall with your product once you've gone through that start going through the questions that you have in line question by question address them verbally but then be sure to include the changes in the prd as well once all of that feedback has been incorporated you can pass the document over to development if there are findings after development say your developers start working in the code and they realize one of the assumptions that you made is incorrect you can make an update to the doc but this should be rare um few and far between and when you do make those changes you should make sure that you have an updated date next to it so that people know that there was a change um especially after it's been reviewed by the entire team this will help minimize confusion later alright so for most of the rest of this presentation we'll focus specifically on requirements and features starting with how to write a requirement what's included in a requirement so you're going to want to start with the who um and writing requirements is always a little awkward at first um but it always starts with who your end user is um so this will be who will be using the product uh it's recommended to be as specific as possible especially if there's different users um that will be using your product within an org or within a rule then you move on to the how and the what so how does the product react when a user is interacting with it and finally the when in what situations does a product require or react this way so like i said when starting out it's going to be a little awkward so think of it as if the user does x in y situation then z happens for example as a shopper i will get a confirmation alert after i complete a purchase so that's a good example of having an external user who is going to interact with your feature in some way and something will happen internal example as an account manager i can override a bid price when an account is underpacing in this situation there is a specific time in which an am which an account manager is able to take an action based on what is happening in your application all right so what kind of requirements are you going to include in your doc first and foremost you should assume that anything that is not included in the doc will not be included in the release the primary requirements you're going to be writing are functional and non-functional requirements so i'll get into those in the next couple slides but you're also going to want to include metrics as well so we'll go through each of these individually now so functional requirements are your product features these are how someone will use the product and how they can expect for it to respond so as an example as an instagram user i will get an error message after an unsuccessful photo upload upload attempt so here i'm saying you know i'm the user i'm in the app i've tried to upload the photo and i'm going to get a response message back if it was unsuccessful but there's going to be some non-functional requirements driving that right um you know it doesn't we get an error message great but how quick how quickly do we time out in what situations do we time out etc so these are the non-functional requirements while functional requirements define what a system does or must not do non-functional requirements specify how the system should do it for example a photo post will time out 30 seconds after unsuccessfully uploading that's not something a user is going to think about your you know you may think about it if you're involved in the space but it's not something that naturally is user facing but it is a very important component because you need to know how long that is going to sit and lag before we're able to say we're going to call it a timeout there outside of these you're going to want your kpis as well as any legal required data um so you want these metrics because you want to be able to track success performance usage etc um so here you can say as a pm you're now the end user here as a pm i can count all of my users who uploaded an image to my team's dashboard you also going with our last example might want to say as a pm i can see a count of all timeouts for video uploads so you're able to see how often that failed all right now we are going to jump into an example so you're a pm at instagram circa 2011 we'll stick with the instagram example and you're looking at implementing instagram like functionality you're going to need to write requirements for this what do you want to consider so i'm going to give you a minute right now just to quickly jot down everything you think would be important in implementing like functionality after that i'm going to go through some considerations that i was thinking of if i was the product manager for this and then we'll break down those considerations into specific product requirements so i'll give you a minute starting now what is it all right so i gave you more like a minute and a half um so hopefully you were able to come up with some good examples um here's some considerations that i had uh when thinking about what i would want to include and these are probably a lot of the things you considered as well um so first being what types of content does this apply to um so now uh there's a lot of different content on instagram can you like everything can you only like posts um so that would be something that you would want to consider and what situations can or can't someone like a post um are there specific people that you can only like posts for we'll get into these more in a bit what steps does someone take to like an image so how does someone actually interact with the functionality that you're building out can someone remove a like is there an undo button and how does that work um what if any feedback does the person liking the image get and what if any feedback does the person receiving the like yet so again these are going to seem probably really basic if you've interacted with this functionality before um but someone had to kind of write the blueprint for it and that's that's what we're looking to do here and then finally kpis and error handling these are just some of the things that were probably included in the prd for that for that product we're definitely not going through an exhaustive list here but this is a starting point for us to consider um what it would be like to build out that feature all right so now now we're going to break down a couple of of these so i'll start with the first couple which is what content types do likes apply to and in what situations can or can't someone like an image so the first one as an instagram user i can like images posted by private accounts i follow so this is saying right away that there is a restriction on which ones i'm going to be able to like as an instagram user i can like images posted by public accounts so this sounds like all right i can like images of accounts that i have access to there are going to be private accounts that i don't follow that i won't be able to like um so this is a way of showing the the proactive way of how someone can interact with this content um but it doesn't assume um sunny day situation where your developer would know that this person isn't able to go and access other images to like that they aren't following all right next one what steps does someone take to like an image and how can someone remove a like so as an instagram user i can like an image by double tapping the image so for those that are familiar with this feature you know that that's one way to do it but there's also another way to do it i can like an image by clicking the heart icon below the image so both of those are ways for your end users to interact with your feature and to get a result back next is how do you undo it the undo option so as an instagram user i can unlike an image that i previously liked by double clicking the image i can also do it by clicking the heart icon so i always struggle with this sometimes i think gosh this feels so redundant i feel like i'm keep writing the same thing over and over again and it's so long i have to start with as a user and it's the same reaction but i find that it's best to have these broken out when you start using ands um or any other conjunctions in the statement uh it gets a little convoluted and you're going to have less of a chance of it being implemented the way that you expected um so where possible don't add conjunctions um come up with a new requirement for that all right um so then we go on to what if any feedback does the person liking the image get and what feedback does the person receiving the like get so from an immediate thought process my head goes to as an instagram user i will receive a push notification when someone likes my image as as that user i can act out of those push notifications as well you want to make sure that you know the situations in which they are able to say they don't want to see this feedback and then as an instagram user i will get an in-app notification when someone likes my image seems easy we've covered the cases it can come outside the app to your phone it can come in the up to your phone but this leads to a bigger question which is that that very simple statement of as an instagram user i can get an in-app notification when someone likes my image that blows up into a whole feature in itself and that is the like tab so you need to consider not just what's going to happen but how the user is going to see that happen and that comes into play a lot with your work with design and making sure that there are clear concepts for how a user is going to get the feedback or interact appropriately with your feature so this extends to now as an instagram user i will see a list ordered by most recent likes having a list isn't enough you have to state exactly how the list is going to look and how it's going to be organized as an instagram user i will only have access to this information for the last 20 likes so this is likely if you didn't have this one here when you went to the prd review uh one of your developers would likely say well what's the cutoff because we can't continue to load this it's going to cause issues with uh loading that screen um there may be issues with just the user interaction from a design perspective um so this is a good one in in realizing that not everything is about why your product is so great you also have to have the limitations of your product as well and then finally as an instagram user if i click on one of these rows it'll take me to the image that was last liked so that's a little more interaction with that like carousel and how it can take you to different places within the app all right so um i am gonna before jumping into kpis i'm just gonna talk about how to organize these while they're top of mind so in order for your requirements to make sense for your team you're going to want them to be organized by the features that you're working on so i recommend by starting with feature but then also organizing by priority one one moment apologies all right so here you can see that for the like screen i have the must have features and those are labeled by priority zero and i have some nice to haves as priority one so when i was thinking through this um feature as a product manager i was thinking there are some obvious things we need we need a screen it needs to have some of the likes they need to be ordered in a specific way so it's not confusing to the um user but things like if i click on a row it takes me back to the image or starting to consolidate uh different likes based on um based on the image those seem like things that are would be great to have but i can launch the feature without it and i still think it would be of value to the shopper um so sorry not to the shopper to the instagram user so consider that when you're you're putting these priorities in place for you they might all seem great you want to have just the best experience ever out there but also consider the amount of dev work that it's going to take so you should likely prioritize on those that are absolutely needed to get out and then have p1's as things that you'll iterate on quickly afterwards oh and one thing to add i do like including a row um or a column that says which uh require ux so that helps one the ux designer realize what work they need to put in and then it also reminds the developers that if there's an xbox of that they should be looking at a design for that feature or for that requirement okay and we can't stop talking about the prd without talking about the kpis um so you'll want to include the metrics here here are some metrics i think would be important but just as the functional requirements there's a lot of considerations that would also likely be included so here i have as a pm i want to track how many users liked an image as a pm i want to track the total number of likes on a platform as a pm i can track how many people unliked mine etc etc so these are all really valuable for me to prove out success here um i'd likely also have some performance monitoring as well um but again this is just a taste of some of the features that i think would be included um some of the requirements that should be talked about i'm sure your list might have different ones as well um definitely did not cover everything here but hopefully this gave you a good example of how to put requirements into practice all right so you wrote your prd now what well your prd should be considered locked once development starts changes should be few and well documented the team will use the prd uh to create stories and to create a project plan while qa will use it to build their qa plan you'll likely use it um in pre-launch as well to ensure implementation was just to spec i always like when i go through a demo with the team and they're showing it to me i kind of just have my prd next to me and kind of check off each feature and if something wasn't shown i asked to review it just to make sure it was implemented appropriately all right so i hope you guys enjoyed this presentation and learned a few things um if you can only take away a couple learnings i recommend the following so a prd is the compass for product development this is your source of truth among the entire team and across everyone working on the project you should be able to send this off to anyone that has questions in terms of what you're implementing they should be able to review it and understand exactly what you're looking to put into production a prd should be reviewed early and often with your team the best chance to catch gaps before investing in development time is talking to your team about the prd and making sure that they're very clear on what your requirements are and also making sure that you have their feedback and that you've implemented other items that you may not have considered that they consider requirements should be written as the end user again i know it's going to feel awkward when you start writing it that way but it will get more comfortable the more you have specific end users um the easier it is for uh your developers want to understand exactly what you need but also the clearer it is in terms of how specific users will interact with your features and finally requirements should cover both product features and properties um so the requirements we went through in the example were all around product features you'd also want to include properties as well um such as what happens if the like doesn't go through what are different error examples what are assumptions that should be made in order for this feature to work um so all of those should be included as you're getting ramped up on this obviously i think it's great for you to work with developers to make sure that all of those properties are included as well all right so thank you again i hope you enjoyed this um and uh good luck getting started writing all of your amazing product [Music] requirements you