👏 Congratulations on completing your first lesson and exercise.

We won’t spend a lot of time on the theory of product management in this course as our we want to use the lessons and exercises in the course to perform the tasks of a product manager responsible for launching a privacy-focused photo sharing app,

In a pure sense, Product Management doesn’t require you to be a developer or a designer, so during this course, you will not be required to write any code or design any user interfaces.

So what is a Product Manager responsible for, and what does he/she do?

Product management is responsible for the overall success of a product. Sachin Rekhi (Founder & CEO of Notejoy) has described product managers’ jobs as “driving the vision, strategy, design, and execution of their product”. It’s a cross-functional role that encompasses responsibilities such as setting the strategic direction, prioritizing the roadmap, understanding the market, empathizing and channeling the voice of the customer, communicating a vision, defining the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of feature development, and (in some cases) owning the profit and loss (P&L) business impacts.

Depending on the size of the company, you will do one or more of the following jobs

• Define and understand the market size and landscape

• Talk to customers

• Coordinate launches

• Write external messaging copy? Sometimes, if the company is small, the PM does what is called Product Marketing.

• Define and prioritize the roadmap

• Research competitors

• Communicate with cross-functional stakeholders

• Conducting usability tests – This is probably co-owned by product and design since user experience is important to both roles

• QA the product – PMs usually review the user experiences before shipping

Read more about A day in the life of a product manager.

👏 Well done!

Let’s kick things off by defining a full Product Lifecycle. This Product Lifecycle framework can be used to create any digital product (web or mobile) regardless of the market you as a PM might be responsible for. In this course, we will work on the first 3 stages – Ideation, Development, and Launch.

Every product goes through the stages of a product lifecycle

• Idea – Coming up with what a product might be, what your customers want or need.

• Development – Building the product, which usually involves incremental steps like MVP (you will learn this soon)

• Launch – Actually putting the product out there so that people can encounter it.

• Growth – After launch, you need to ensure that you can get your product in the hands of your target customer segments.

• Maturity – When a product’s growth plateaus, the new customers using your product could start to taper off, or use of it can stabilize, without adding new users.

• Decline – This is the final stage in the lifecycle of a product when your customer base decreases/declines because either other better alternatives are available to customers, or the need for the problems your product solves no longer exist.

As a Product Manager, knowing the lifecycle of your product, and which stage of the lifecycle your product is in, helps you determine where you should be spending your time and what you should be thinking about.

In this course, we will be focusing on learning and honing skills for the first three stages – Idea, Development, Launch.

Let’s build on what we learned in the previous lesson and exercise.

By using the What/How/Why Framework. we were able to understand the benefit/value of any feature we want to create in our app. The features in our app are simply solutions to the customer problems/needs.

Our next challenge is, who are our customers, and where would we find them? 🤔

A Product Manager does what’s known as Customer Discovery to identify the potential customers. This is a critical job of product management so that you can identify the target customer segments for your product

You’re building a product so that it can be used and enjoyed by customers. It’s important to identify who your potential customers are.
Regardless of whether you’re working on an existing or new product, you’ll want to do some work on customer discovery. This is the process of identifying who are the right people for your product – who has the needs that your product addresses. Sometimes, an existing customer-base isn’t the right one for a product. Sometimes there are whole new demographics that would appreciate your product.

A simple framework you could use to identify who your potential customers are:

• For Existing Products
  • The current customers
• For New Products
  • Customers of old or proxy products
  • Customers of competitors

👏 After the previous lesson and exercise, we should now have a good idea who our potential customers are, and even where we might find them.

From doing customer discovery, let’s say for the privacy-focused social photo sharing app you are creating as a product manager, we learned that the following types of people would be our key customer segment:

• People who have a good cameras – either on their phone or DSLR cameras.

• Creative people who take interesting photographs.

• Photography students who want to observe and learn from other photographers.

We can use this information to perform one of the most important job as a Product Manager – Customer Interviews

If there was ever a secret to successful product management, it would be this — the ability to listen to your customers.

“Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.”
— Tony Robbins

You have to talk to them and find out how best to address the want or need they have which your product solves. Talking to people to understand the problems, needs, and wants is an art.

When you’re talking to customers, you want to make sure you’re always talking about the need or want that your product is (going to be) satisfying. Learning about how they use our/our competitors product will help us build a better product. The point is effectively gathering the most information on how our product can be enhanced or changed or marketed or whatever else needs to happen to make it appealing to its customers.

The skill to learn and practice here is the art of surveys and questionnaires. At 30DaysofProduct, we will use the Five Ws Framework.

• Who are your customers?
• What are their habits?
• When do they need your product?
• Where do they need your product?
• Why do they need your product?

Congratulations, you have made it to the “Development” phase of the product life cycle. All the lessons and exercises so far were designed to get us to the point where we can start building the product.

As a product manager, the best tool you have to use during this phase is called “User Stories”.

A good user story tells you what’s motivating the user and what problem they want to solve. User stories are useful to everyone, but especially for developers and designers, who can use the user stories as a guide to design and develop the features we want in the product.

A comprehensive user story contains:

• A title – A short way to summarize the feature
• The story
  • What is the user doing?
  • What does the user want to achieve?
  • Why do they want to achieve this?
• Acceptance criteria – A list of ways we can judge whether the user story has been done. This can also include a list of some corner cases that we want to make sure we implement in the product. For example, if we want to validate an email address before signing up a user, we would mention that as an acceptance criteria for a user story.

You can read more about how to write good user stories here.