Product Management 101

The intention for this page is to capture bits and pieces of knowledge on product management…

Product strategy

How do we make the product vision a reality, while meeting the needs of the company as we go. It requires choice, thinking, and effort. Once the product strategy is defined, goals and roadmap need to be aligned.

The biggest challenges with product strategy is to ensure that we are making choices on what is really important. These choices need to be informed from generated insights and help the organization focus and set priorities.

It boils down to 1) focus the organization on a small number of truly important problems, 2) identify key insights, 3) convert the insights into actions in the form of objectives, 4) manage the teams for success (remove obstacles).

Resources:
SVPG – product strategy overview

Insights

4 valuables source of insights: quantitative, qualitative, technology, and industry.

• Quantitative: analysis of product data like business model, acquisition funnel, customer retention, etc. Being able to run live-data tests (A/B testing) is an important skill for an organization.
• Qualitative: comes from user research, can be very profound even if not statistically significant. Insights can be either evaluative (testing out new ideas) or generative (discovering new opportunities).
• Technology: new technology can bring new perspective to solve long-standing problems in a new way. Monitoring the technology space is important to catch these insights.
• Industry: what are the major industry trends and insights in other industries that may pertain to your industry.

All generated insights needs to be shared and communicated. This is where leaders become important as a way to aggregate and distribute the insights to the right people. The most important insights can be summarized and shared with the broader organization.

Resources:
SVPG – Product Strategy Insights

Actions

Two approaches to set actions, you can either have a team of mercenaries (executing on your order) or a team of missionaries (executing on a vision). The first team is efficient when you need to add features to a roadmap while the other one is generally better at building the right product.

A system like OKR (Objective and Key Results) is the most popular.

• Objective are the customer (or business problem) we need to solve.
• Key results: how we measure progress.

Resources:
SVPG – Product Strategy Actions

Management

There are number of issues and obstacles that will emerge, management will need to provide assistance to unblock them and make sure the product team keeps making progress towards their objectives.

Resources:
SVPG – Product Strategy Management