Think of the application that you run first on your new device,
not the one you love, but the one you can’t manage without.
There’s a way to make sure that you, specifically, - with your habits, work-life balance, and daily plans -
have this app, keep using it, and sometimes, even pay for it.
What exactly does product management mean for a business?
Sleeping in the factory to hammer away at “production hell”?
Or giving perfect, movie-grade keynotes?
In reality, it’s usually not like that.
What you will hear is: Product management is driving products from inception to delivery and through an entire lifecycle.
it’s a kinda vague definition. But bear with us for a moment.
The key word here is “drive.” It means that product managers don’t directly write code, create prototypes, or set up marketing campaigns.
Instead, product management entails uniting engineers, designers, business analysts, marketing, and stakeholders
into a well-oiled mechanism to achieve product success.
It ensures that every member of the team serves the same goal:
Deliver a product that people need and want to buy.
In product management terms, it’s called finding a product/market fit.
The idea of product/market fit is as simple as answering the question: “Are there people who will buy my product?”
In practice, it’s never easy to find and occupy this sweet spot.
What do our customers look like? Do we solve their critical problem?
Will they be willing to pay for the product? And how do we know if there are people who need the product at all?
The team and product managers must answer these questions regularly,
even driving mature and successful products, because the market constantly changes.
Finding and constantly re-finding a product/market fit is a task that requires vision, strategy, customer understanding, and proper execution.
A product vision is like a navigational star.
It’s always there and it shows where the product must go and what impact it must have on people’s lives.
So, the app that people install first is already a vision, but most successful products are more specific than that.
An AI-driven writing assistant, Grammarly, has a vision of
“becoming a true communication assistant that improves how people connect with and understand each other.”
A vacation rental service, Airbnb, “exists to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.”
An impactful vision helps steers the team towards a defined goal.
It serves as a reference point to constantly question: Are we moving in the right direction?
Articulating the vision and reminding the team of it is the responsibility of stakeholders and product managers.
The vision helps with a general direction, but it doesn’t tell much about what to do now or in the near term.
While a vision is like a star that doesn’t change, a strategy updates regularly.
A good practice is to review it at least once a year.
Product managers and stakeholders are in charge of setting and documenting it.
They collaborate with marketing managers to run the market research and understand how big the market is and who the potential customers are.
What are their age groups? Where do they work and live?
Together with a marketing team, a product manager defines who the main competitors are.
The strategy also documents the customer problem the product solves
and the value it delivers better than competitor products on the market. This is known as a value proposition.
For instance, a popular hotel booking service, HotelTonight, has both right in its name.
It allows customers to book a hotel and do it at the last minute - tonight.
Finally, a strategy defines what the customer acquisition approaches are
and how to measure success with key performance indicators.
For a new, yet-to-be-launched product, these hypotheses must be tested.
Existing products must iteratively go over these points to refine them and avoid the product/market fit slipping away.
While a strategic document is still a high-level description of a product, it lacks deep understanding of customers.
Have you ever wondered why the YouTube icon on iPhones looked like this up until 2012?
What about an old Instagram icon?
With smartphones and apps being relatively new back then, designers tried to mimic real-life objects,
help users realize what sort of service stands behind an icon.
Today we have hamburger menus, abstract icons, and a save sign that reminds of a long-retired technology.
Great design always thinks of customers, their current knowledge, and
how they are going to interact with a product.
It’s rarely about solving the problem only, but rather enabling users to do it fast and in a meaningful way.
To achieve a meaningful product design, a static set of wireframes and concepts isn’t enough.
It must be a continuous process of making assumptions, experimenting, and refining the experience to constantly learn from and about users.
The design team from Slack, a popular messaging app for professional workspaces,
worked 3 years over 7 different design iterations to do the message threads feature right.
Slack has a firm grip on understanding their customers. They first test design versions on the own staff,
since ultimately the development team is also the target audience of the app.
But to have a clear picture of the users, product managers engage marketing and UX
to run customer research, conduct interviews, surveys, capture feedback,
or even track user reactions to design versions.
One of the main methods that help the team understand the customer is creating fictional characters or user personas.
A user persona is much like a CV, but with many personal details:
age, gender, lifestyle, habits, work, income, and anything that may help a designer look at the world from a customer’s eyes
and realize how exactly this person will interact with a product.
The code that you install isn’t a product.
It’s a temporary snapshot of things that the team has shipped and tested so far.
The real product starts with the vision and strategy that the team along with stakeholders have agreed on.
At this point, product manager and stakeholders start filling a backlog -
a list of items that will define how the product will look like and how it will evolve over time.
A product manager must define priorities, considering strategic goals, and
set the order of product delivery features in the backlog.
With a new product, the initial features will define the minimum viable product or MVP.
Usually, MVPs are functional builds with a bare minimum of capabilities
that still solve a user problem and deliver the core value.
Once an MVP is shipped, a product manager takes care of gathering feedback to specify customer understanding,
re-define priorities, and sometimes even update a strategy to ensure that the product fits the market.
And, as we mentioned, this process keeps re-iterating through all the stages of the product life cycle.
To document the delivery path, product managers use roadmaps.
A roadmap is a plan that breaks down the product delivery by stages -
MVP, Beta, 1.0 - and by responsibilities.
Finally, as soon as the application goes live, the team must measure its success.
In the logistics metaphors, metrics and KPIs are similar to gauges.
Depending on the stage of product maturity, they may be different.
For instance, having an MVP, it’s reasonable to measure customer acquisition cost and traffic,
while for growing and mature products the core metrics may be
Return on investment, Profit and revenue, Active users, Customer retention and so on
These metrics help shape the strategy, prioritize the features, or cause a directional pivot.
Can a product exist without dedicated product management function within the team? Definitely.
There may not be a defined vision. Every team member will develop their own.
And the vision of an engineer may not directly match the vision of a stakeholder.
Many products exist without a clear understanding of a user.
Back in 1999, Nielsen Norman Group tracked how users interact with different navigation schemes in an eCommerce website.
The first scheme was built according to internal assumptions,
while the second version incorporated users’ expectations.
The success rate of finding an item grew from 9 percent in an assumed navigation to 80 percent in the navigation built based on user research.
Products may even exist without a documented and conscious strategy.
CB insights publishes startup failure post-mortems every year.
The top reason for a fail is that nobody needs a product.
42 percent of post-mortems acknowledge that there was no market need.
Since strategy is the only way to handle a product/market fit, the lack of one makes product success… well, a gamble.