Product Development — 1

• Learn how to influence the team members that you work with either directly or indirectly when you don’t have any authority.
• Understand the different development methodologies with a deep-dive into the most popular one coupled with how and where your detailed requirements are captured.
• Learn the skills to write user stories with detailed acceptance criteria and also non-user requirements to develop a stable and functional product that is capable of addressing customer needs effectively.
• Learn how to manage the different types of the backlog that a PM owns and maintains while handling various types of requests that a PM typically receives throughout the day.

Influencing without Authority

Here are the main topics we’ll be going over in this lesson: How to build and maintain your social capital (become credible, build trust). Essential leadership and team player qualities that you can combine to guide the team.

After this lesson, you’ll be able to Know what tasks and activities to carry out as a PM after joining a new company and on a continuous basis to become the go-to person for the product you own. Lead your development team, manage stakeholders expectations and setup team members involved in your initiative for success.

Become Credible

Key Points for Becoming Credible

As a new Product Manager who just joined the company, you will be excited, overwhelmed with a lot of mixed emotions. To prepare for the interview, you had done your fair share of homework on the company, product and probably some of their competitors.

So as a new employee you will have lots of questions and some great suggestions for improvement. But you first need to build trust and become credible in order to have your ideas taken seriously.

To become credible, use your first few weeks in the new job as the perfect opportunity to seek answers to your questions, validate your assumptions, and know who the competitors are. Use the opportunity to gain information about the company, the market it is trying to serve and the product.

In other words:

• Know your company
• Know your market
• Know your product

There is no end date to stop learning but definitely use the initial 2–6 weeks after joining the company to learn the above.

Start with the Mission, Vision, and Strategy

Knowing your company starts with the mission, vision, and strategy. It is important to understand the company’s purpose i.e what does it exist for, what is it trying to achieve and how does it plan to achieve. This is called a company’s Mission, Vision, and Strategy. Depending upon the company’s culture, you will see these printed and posted on the office walls or on their website. The purpose of this is to constantly remind everyone what the company stands for.

Example:

Revisiting Sworkit. Take a look at Sworkit’s About-Us page to get familiar with a company that talkies about itself very well.

As you explore Sworkit, also think about:

• Who is their target customer?
• What are the unmet needs of the customer?
• What are their needs that are not satisfied by any other alternative in the market?
• How does the company create value?

Know your Market

What do you need to learn?

Knowing your company goes beyond the mission, vision and strategy. It is about knowing the details that go into defining the strategy to support the company’s mission and achieving the vision.

• Who is the target customer?
• What are the customer’s unmet needs?
• Who are the competitors?
• How does the company create value?
• How does the company grow?

I highly recommend spending the initial 2–6 weeks of joining as a Product Manager to acquire the above knowledge to believe in your own message, define the problem to solve and identify the solutions.

As a Product Manager, you are tasked with the responsibility to determine what are the best next focused set of initiatives that you and your team should take to progress towards the company and the product’s goals. In order to do this effectively you need to understand the market, how is it evolving and what are the opportunities for you to tackle.

In order to define the market, let’s look at different techniques that can we used to identify key attributes to better define your target customer in the market.

• Psychographic Segmentation is used to categorize people based on their values, interests, opinions, and attitude.

Let’s apply this to Sworkit. If you look at their company, they are trying to cater to individuals who are comfortable with technology and confident to exercise individually within the confines of their home without the need to be in a fitness gym space. This distinguishes their target customer very clearly from those individuals who do not like working out of a home but would rather go to a gym and have a place that is dedicated to exercise.

• Demographics Segmentation is used to categorize people based on race, gender, and other demographic traits.

Demographic segmentation is an outcome of the psychographic segmentation since we now know an individual’s sexual orientations. Others can be categorized based on age group, income bracket, and geographical locations

• Behavioral Segmentation is another key attribute that will help you understand user behavior. What action do your customers take, why do they take it and when i.e how frequently. In our Sworkit example, the exercisers prefer to work out on a regular basis (could be twice a week, five a week) depending upon a combination of factors such as their fitness level, time available to workout.
• Needs-based Segmentation The key to success will be understanding their unmet needs that will help you pick the right problem to solve.

Let’s revisit our Sworkit example to understand this better. We know that Sworkit exercisers like having a workout routine. What is the definition of a workout routine here? A workout routine could include a specific number of workouts to be completed within a week. This workout routine could be pre-defined or customized but also what goes into each workout matters. If the workout needs of the target customers are: As an individual exerciser that likes working out of home, I would like to join other exercisers virtually at the same time to follow the same set of exercises (e.g Zumba ) vs. As an individual exerciser that likes working out of home, I would like to start a workout and follow the exercise instructions on my TV screen. These are very different needs and there are going to different ways to solve them.

You can use publicly available data and information available from your company to define the market and understand your customers. All this quantitative data will become more powerful when you actually combine it with qualitative data because this is going to help you understand your customers better and make your storytelling more powerful.

Talk to Your Customers

One of the most often undervalued but powerful tactic is talking to your customers. Interview your customers to gather information about what they do, why do they do what they do? Is their a current alternative product used, what do they like about? Of course, it requires open-ended questions. Spend time understanding your customers. That’ll help you unearth rich insights about them.

With Sworkit, we talked about individuals needing customized workout plans. You can take this information as a given or go ahead and dig deeper to understand why is this needed. It could be a variety of reasons:

• Someone is going through the recovery process and needs to have a custom-built exercises that help them recover without injuring them further
• Their fitness goal is very specific: improve core strength and become flexible
• Their current workout needs a few exercises to be swapped before they could progress to the next fitness level and utilize a pre-defined workout.

Observe Your Customers

Observe your customers. You cannot uncover user-experience focused requirements if you have not observed your target customers in their environment.

In the Sworkit example, we will observe our target customers in a fitness gym.

You observe that users take a break for a few minutes and in some instances, a few users started an exercise and skipped it to move on to the next one.

Observing these nuances helps you ask clarifying questions to gather insights such as :

• One user skipped an exercise due to body soreness today while the other needed to take a break for a few minutes before resuming their workout.

These insights cannot be found unless you observe your target customers and talk to them. Then, when you design the product you will add a feature to skip an exercise or pause and resume a workout. When your customer uses this, they will be delighted and probably say ‘ this product gets me. I like it!’

That is a moment for you to rejoice!

Knowing your market goes beyond just knowing who your target customer is and their ‘unmet’ needs at a high level. It is about learning the rich details that define your customer using various segmentation techniques and utilizing them to assess the market better

• Define your target customer with rich attributes such as values, demographics etc.
• Understand the dynamics of the evolving market, the trends and how is it growing.
• Make time to understand your target customers: use interviews, focus groups, survey and even observation to gain such insights.

Know your Product

The Approach

The first step to knowing your product is testing the product. A common slang you may hear is ‘dogfooding’, where the company tests the product that is going to launch to identify and fix issues. In this scenario, there is no product launch but you are testing the product to understand how it functions.

Some questions to think about:

• What information is requested from the user on a specific page?
• How long does the page take to load?
• What happens when the product is tested on a cellular network?

Another important reason to test is you will understand:

• How does your product interact with other parts of the company’s product(s)?

Using the Sworkit example here, if you joined their product team, how would you go about getting up to speed on the product?

You might take a look at the images from the app store listing, just like a user would and read the information and reviews. You might download the app and try to create a new account using a non-existent account to read the error messages displayed and try to request a new password. The goal here is to understand how useful or informative are the error messages.

You might try out a few workouts, and see if the summary received was insightful? You might opt into the notifications or reminders and see how they work. Essentially be put yourself in the shoes of a user.

By the time you finished testing, you would have formed an opinion:

• Is the product delighting its users?
• Is the product meeting the customer needs? IF not, where are the gaps?

The answers to all of these questions and your experience will lead you to your first list of issues and improvements.

Summary

Build Trust

How can you build trust?

• Take time to know your peer’s teams. These are the cross-functional team members that you will be working with closely across the different stages of product development.
• Get to know your development team well. You will work closely to define what to build, how to build with this team.

What do you gain from this?

Good team dynamics make or break a team. Building a strong relationship requires you to understand what everyone does, their challenges, and how you can help each other. This lays the foundation for a cohesive team and opens up communication channels to share feedback because the team members know that all of you are working with each other towards a common goal.

The product manager is shown in the center with a lot of arrows because you are going to be talking to a lot of people!

Core/Development Team:

• Product Designer: you will be working closely with them from the problem definition through the solution phase to launch the product and analyze the feedback. You will also conduct user research to validate both the problem and the solution.
• Engineering Team: You will be partnering with them to define how to solve the problem as you work with the designer.
• Quality Assurance Team: Often referred to as the QA team. This is your partner in crime to break the product that you are building to make sure it works as expected when it gets in the hands of real users.
• Data Analyst: Depending upon the company you may have a data analyst to partner with. These team members provide you with various metrics: product metrics, company metrics. In order to analyze these metrics, it is important to have them tracked in the first place. You will partner with the data analyst to define the requirements to track the data, test to confirm the requirements are met successfully and set up various experiments as part of the product launch.

Product Manager Extended Team

Beyond the core development team a product manager may also interact regularly with:

• Marketing: In some companies, they may be called a product marketing team, adoption team, etc. You partner with this team to determine the activities to be carried out to ensure that the product you’re launching is discovered by your customers and adopted successfully
• Sales Team: In some companies, they may be business development, account executives, etc. The sales team needs to understand the product features and their intended benefits clearly to be able to communicate them to potential clients.
• Customer Support Team: Not every single user problem or product issue can be solved in the product immediately. After the product launch, they will be your front line team members interacting with irate customers sometimes and helping them to resolve issues.
• Account Management Team: Their name varies across companies such as client management, customer success, client implementation, and operations, etc. The account managers step in once the product has been sold. They take over the client relationship from the sales team to onboard and continue to manage the client relationship through product upgrades and renewals. You may partner with this team closely to receive customer feedback early on during the solution discovery phase, attend calls to pitch your new product idea, or resolve a major customer concern.
• Finance Team: you will be responsible to make sure their reporting and accounting needs are met. Depending upon the type of company and product you manage your need to partner with finance team will vary.

Product Manager Super Power: One on Ones

As a product manager, you have to work with almost every single team in the company If you work in isolation it is going to be very challenging for you to coordinate product launch, know when your product is not working or get someone’s help because at end of the day we all need to help each other.

This is where the power of one-on-one meetings come in. You meet with an individual from the peer team that you will be working very closely with and will coordinate a lot.

Reach out to your peers that you will work closely with to set up a meeting and then:

• Take time to understand their roles and responsibilities.
• Know what do they do at the company, specifically what do they do when it comes to partnering with the product team.
• How do they collaborate?
• Understand how they share feedback and new ideas.
• Are they receiving roadmap updates?
• Are they being informed about product updates?
• What is working well in the current process?
• This will help you understand what you need to carry out specifically to collaborate with them
• What can you do to improve this process?
• Listen keenly to understand what are they asking and why? Knowing this will help you identify tasks to address their feedback.
• What urgent issues do they believe need to be addressed now?
• Is this something you can help solve?
• Follow up on your conversations.
• This helps build trust that you were listening and care about what they think.
• Set up a regular meeting with them.
• This helps build rapport with consistent contact.

Know your development teams

What existing challenges need to be addressed? Understand the current product implementation. How is the product built? What are the engineering goals you need to be aware of? From your 1x 1 meeting with the development team members, you gained a sneak peek into how the product has been built and how testing works.

It is essential to understanding the inner workings of both the product and the team. Meet with them again if needed. We will focus on understanding the engineering implementation and testing process. In your meeting with the engineering lead, understand how the product is built (e.g., architecture design). What are the challenges that need to be addressed? Are there any engineering goals to be accomplished? As a PM you are going to be managing a single list of tasks to complete (which is called backlog) and if that does not reflect their engineering goals how can they meet their goal?

Understand the current testing process

Extend the same philosophy to the QA team member.

How is the product tested?

Understand how they test a product: Do they have a combination of manual testing and automated testing? If you used manual testing to try to break the product to know the product, try automated testing. Automated testing does not require someone to sit in front of a screen and interact with the product. Automated testing could be done by utilizing a third-party tool or writing scripts that need to be run. Let’s take the example of mobile apps that are in IOS and Android: A combination of manual and automated testing is used. It is important to ensure the best user experience is available across all devices and platforms. Third-party tools may be used to verify the user experience across different platforms and devices without the need for a team to maintain an inventory of every device used by the target customers. When automated testing used? Some teams automate the verification of existing features to ensure they are not broken when an existing feature is improved or a new feature is added. When Manual Testing is used? Manual testing is typically conducted when a new feature is being built and launched, and QA members will test the new feature by interacting with it. Some companies add automation to the new feature as well and may verify critical existing functionalities manually

What existing challenges need to be addressed?

What are the challenges in the testing process? Some of their challenges cannot be resolved by Product Managers, while others can be. Let’s take an example that I have often seen teams run into, and I personally did at the early stages of my career. Many QA team members like conducting exploratory testing for a new product, especially a critical product. During my early stint as a Product Manager, when the QA team member had completed their verification, I noticed far more critical issues while testing the product previously gone unnoticed and these got me very frustrated. What went wrong here? I met with the testers and shared my feedback, expressed my disappointment in how their testing was not giving the desired coverage. After some back and forth, we realized the real problem was the issues I identified by testing were due to my understanding of how users tend to behave in the real world and their constraints. I had not shared this information in full details with the testers.
Your responsibility as a product manager is to be the eyes and voice of your users to the development team. Take all the learnings and insights about your customer and their environment and including emotional aspect of the users, so that the tester is able to put themselves in the shoes of the user and various emotions they go through and test the product to find critical issues and provide feedback on the product usability as well. Understand their goals. For e.g., a QA team wants to reduce the number of critical issues that are identified when the product goes live by x % within the next 3 months. Knowing this will help you understand how to coordinate early on and test the product to launch a high-quality product

Know your teams

Unleash the power of One on Ones:

Set up regular one on ones to meet with team members in your core team and peer teams. Develop a communication channel where feedback, ideas, and issues can be shared without any concerns because of the underlying trust that binds all of you together. Spend sufficient time knowing how does your core team work and also how is the product built and tested. These are layers to the knowledge foundation that you need to be able to collaborate effectively

• Develop open communication channel between teams
• Know the inner workings of the team
• Gain knowledge and learn to collaborate effectively

Good team dynamics make or break a team. Building a strong relationship requires you to understand what does everyone do, their challenges in order to determine how can you help each other. This lays the foundation for a cohesive team.

• Set up regular one on ones to meet with team members in your core team and peer teams. Develop a communication channel where feedback, ideas and issues can be shared without any concerns because of the underlying trust that binds all of you together.
• Spend sufficient time knowing how does your core team work and also how is the product built and tested. These are layers to the knowledge foundation that you need to be able to collaborate effectively.

Start doing this within the first two to six weeks of joining as a product manager and continue on an ongoing basis.

Guiding the Team Key Points

The Art of Storytelling

• Create a very powerful and engaging story to communicate your project scope.
• Get your audience will be able to empathize with your user and their problems.
• Weave your story to help the audience in connecting the dots between the user and their problem to the product strategy and goals.

Master the Art of Saying No

• You should listen to ideas and feedback.
• Respond according to the product strategy and goals.

Run Meetings Effectively

• Make sure decisions are made.
• Keep the conversation on topic.
• Be clear on a meeting purpose.

Be an Expert Negotiator

• Concentrate on achieving a common goal.

Set Everyone Up for Success by Coordinating Well

• Create coordination activity maps.

By Guiding the Team you Will be Achieving Better Outcomes as a Team

• You should always be guiding the team towards success.

Becoming a storyteller means moving away from requirements, numbers, and graphs and focusing on the user, their problems, and the impact to make it more engaging for the audience to believe in the problem, the proposed solution, and the impact of solving it.

• What problem is being solved?
• How does it impact the user?
• What is the impact of solving the problem on product strategy and goals?
• What is the solution?

1. Transport the audience in the meeting room to visualize the problem that you are trying to solve and highlight the importance of the problem using data and user quotes
2. Share information on how is the user affected by the problem and help the audience to empathize with the user by highlighting their motivations, challenges, frustrations etc
3. Tie back the impact of solving this problem effectively to the product strategy and goal to emphasize the need to solve this problem now vs. later
4. Walkthrough the solution using a design prototype and avoid reading the requirements document
5. Share the list of rejected alternatives along with the reasoning.

Life Skills: Art of Saying No

How to say ‘No’?

You cannot say “Yes” to every idea or feature. Focusing means saying ‘no’ to really good ideas sometimes. Delivery of this feedback and how you engage in this conversation is key to guiding the team members without affecting the trust you have built so far or decreasing the earned social capital

• Listen with intent to ask clarifying questions
• Always Follow-Up: Paraphrase succinctly
• Always Follow-Up: Share your objective rationale
• Attitude and body language matters

Life Skills: Run meetings effectively

How can you run effective meetings?

Life Skills: Negotiation

How can you negotiate effectively?

How Might you Handle this Situation?

• Focus on team dynamics
• Talk with the Engineer and the Researcher to hear both sides of their story and validate their concerns.
• Work with them to come to a resolution.
• Identify the real problem to solve and the goal to achieve
• By working with the team, you can identify the root problem and goal to solve that problem.
• Evaluate solutions against guiding principles
• Don’t forget to evaluate these new solutions against your guiding principles.

As a Product Manager, you will be negotiating whether you realize it or not to make big and small decisions. The impact and nature of these decisions may vary but the underlying principles are the same which have been laid out below:

• Focus on team dynamics
• Identify the real problem to solve and the goal to achieve
• Evaluate solutions against guiding principles

Coordination Activities Map

How do you create this?

Coordination Activities Map Key Points

When creating a coordination activities map, the first step to defining the coordination activities is to determine the responsibilities of those who you would be working with. The goal of defining the responsibilities is to minimize the confusion and promote transparency in order to drive decisions.

Driver

• Limited to one person
• Moves the project forward
• Usually the Product Manager
• Additional Responsibilities
• Schedule and run meetings
• Gather feedback
• Negotiate with decision-makers
• Make trade-off decisions
• Followup with stakeholders

Approver

• Try to limit to a small group
• Has final say on a specific aspect of the project
• The person in this role varies
• Not all items need to be approved
• Having one person as the approver expedites the process

Contributor

• Give opinions or expertise
• Do not make decisions
• Can be assigned to many different roles in an organization

Informed

• Are updated on the progress as it impacts their work
• Do not make decisions
• Could be anyone who's work is impacted

As a PM, you set everyone in the organization for success by involving them early and keeping them engaged to ensure each involved stakeholder can plan and manage their work efficiently. This involves

• Identify the role and responsibility of involved team members
• Start coordinating early
• Maintain a feedback loop to keep involved team members engaged

I hope this lesson has helped you recognize the qualities you possess that need to be honed and the new qualities you need to gain to build and maintain strong relationships with the people you work with. When then newly learned frameworks are combined with these powerful but often underestimated soft-skills, you will be able to not only gain Credibility and Trust but also guide the team to work together to achieve a common goal. “Gain Credibility — Build Trust — Guide the team” — these essential qualities can be summarized using a single term: “earn social capital”. Remember this is the only currency that increases in quantity when spent right!