Product Management First Steps

Product Lifecycle

While a waterfall lifecycle could take years, an agile cycle might take only a few
weeks or a month.

The other interesting twist with agile, is that multiple cycles happen at the same
time, as you are building one sprint, you are also researching and planning the next
one. This creates a lifecycle that is staggered and you as a product manager, flow
between the sprints.

It's entirely possible as a product manager to be in the refine stage for one sprint,
looking at how customers are working with the product, building features for the

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 next release of the product and researching features for a future version. The value
of this process is that if there is an issue that is identified, you can be quick to
address it, in other words you can be agile.

So if something is identified and the refine phase, you can address it in a future
version while your engineers are busy at work on current features that need to be
built.

Research Phase:

Primarily, you should divide them into quantitative and qualitative sections.

Quantitative research is the way to get a lot of data from a lot of people.

It uses standardized questions and responses with no room for variation. The
result is data that aligns to show trends and provide feedback which can help
direct your project.

When you create a survey, consider the following things:

1. How large is the entire population that you're going to evaluate?

2. What margin of error are you comfortable with?

3. What confidence level do you have for the reliability of the data?

Table for population size vs sample per margin of error:

Qualitative feedback provides color to the emotional and personal preferences

people can sometimes have.

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 These preferences include important information that is missed in standardized
surveys.

Qualitative research consists of open-ended discussion. So you're able to explore

different areas and you aren't limited to a specific list of questions.

There are two other ways to think about where we get this data from. Internal and
External.

1. Internal Data

This is data that you have gathered during the research phase for your product.

When you're building a product for the first time, this information can be tough
to get.

2. External Data

This is information that comes from outside of your product or company.

You're looking at the needs of customers that are in your audience, but you
don't have any internal data on them.

Each quadrant in the graph can create new questions that you can verify and ask in
another quadrant. A survey might report a trend that you can verify in a customer

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 interview, which might then be verified in an industry report or through internal
analytics data.

Planning Customer meeting

1. Define who will be part of the customer meeting process. 

When you think of your core team, you should find a few individuals that will be
part of every step of the process. Sometimes this is called the discovery team
or tiger team. 

Having the product manager and a representative from the user

experience, engineering, and marketing teams is recommended as core
members. They are at every meeting, part of every discussion, and are with the
process from start to finish.

2. Define who you want to meet with. Think in terms of categories. 

These people could be from specific industries, demographics, or they could

be potential customers. A good number to shoot for is three to five. 

When you have to find who you want to meet with, use that list as a guide to
make sure you are setting up meetings with customers equally across all the
groups.

3. You need to have agreement on the critical questions that are to be

answered by the end of the interview process. 

Try to keep this to a small number at first, maybe about five or seven. 

Make them specific so you can design your discussion to get a solid answer at
the end.

4. When you have agreement on all of this, you need to schedule your

meetings. 

How you do this is entirely up to you based on, of course, on the type of

customer and product. Just remember to use the categories you defined
earlier to find the balance of people that you want. 

Being there in person is a huge advantage over doing interviews over video

conferencing or the telephone. There is an emotional aspect to being there that
leads to better and more beneficial conversations. 

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 Once you have your meetings set up, determine your agenda and hold the
meeting, the important part of a meeting is to make sure that you aren't doing
most of the talking. You're there to listen, so you need to structure the
discussion to get them to speak with you. Schedule the meeting to include all
members of the core team. 

You should assign one of them to be the team scribe, meaning that they will
write down almost everything that is said by the customer for you to refer to
later.

Executing a Customer meeting

1. Introduce all the participants and explain how they relate to each other so
the customer knows who they are talking to. 

This will help the customer anticipate the type of questions that they might
get from your team and how to answer. 

2. Then, let the customer introduce themselves, invite them to talk about what
they do, but don't let them dive into what they like or don't like about the
product just yet, that time will come. 

3. Next, let the customer vent. Give them time to let it all out. 

This does a couple things. First, it's cathartic and helps the customer get
out any frustration that they might have. 

4. Finally, you want to guide the customer from the freeform venting and
towards something more focused on what you want to talk about. 

You want to have them react to something that you put in front of

them. Often, these are statements and you should use a mix of positive and
negative statements that are related to what you want to pitch. 

Ask your customer if they agree or disagree with any of these

statements and try to have that flow into the next phase. 

When you sit down with a customer in a meeting, they often have a lot of
feedback that is already in their mind, but that might not mesh well with the
conversation that you want to have.

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 The $100 test for feature evaluations

1. Make a list of all the features or capabilities of your product, plus add a

couple of blank lines for features the customer might've
requested during your earlier discussions. 

2. Then tell the customer they can spend $100 on features. So if I have
five features, my customer will tell me what is most important to them
based on how much investment they put into the development of each
one. It is best provide some context when you do this. 

3. For example, if they contribute $5, the feature will be there but it will be

very simple and elementary. For $20, they will get a feature that will be
well thought out and well developed. For 50, the feature will be best in
class and better than the competition. It will be a feature the customer
will love. 

4. Sometimes you may like to put in a few conditions when I run the

test. For example, if your product has five features and you give the
individual $100, I might tell them that they can only have a minimum
investment of $5 and that they must eliminate one feature entirely. In
this case, you're requiring the customer to think critically about what
they really want and what they're willing to live without, giving you the
ability to focus on what you want to build in the product. 

5. At the end, you'll have a clear list of what features customers value over
others. The best part is that you can use this model to compare multiple
customer meetings and see if there are trends or similarities based on
the people you talk to.

After the customer meeting ends:

The best thing to do is immediately sit down as a group and

summarize. 

Don't talk about the meeting at all until you're able to sit down and
talk as a group. 

Ask each team member: 

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 1. what was the worst thing that you heard in the meeting?

2.  What was the best thing you heard? 

3. What went well and what didn't? 

These basic questions are great ways to categorize people's

responses, to help guide your next conversation with another
customer.

At the end, you'll have a complete list of the customer's vents on

the product, their reactions to statements or opinions of the
product, unsolicited responses to your product features, a
prioritization of what's most important to them, and your team's
summary of what works and what didn't.

Plan:

1. Define overall schedule (both for releases and updates of plans)

2. Identify the changing market conditions and prioritize features.

3. Provide user stories (these are the work items for your team)

Strategies to prioritize product features:

1. Look at the current market conditions and how they relate to your product.

2. Organize your features into groups. How you organize them is up to you.
Personally, I have found that groups of three and five are best. (Refer the
image below)

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 3. Take these groups and prioritize them. One way to create is a radial map.
(Refer the image below)

Start from a point in the center and draw a line for each group from the
center outward, then draw a diagram like this one anchoring on three or five
or how many groups you have.

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 Each wedge of the diagram represents a category that you use to organize
your features. Each ring represents time. The inner ring is now, the middle
ring is soon and the outer ring is later.

Your job with the help of others on your team is to take all the features you
have and place them on the radial map.

The trick is to make sure that your inner circle has only a few features in it.
The middle circle will have more and the rest are in the outer ring. As you
do this, try a variety of combinations.

The first thing you need to do, is look at how much time you have to
build, capacity is the time you have to do the work you need to do. 

Let's say we've defined a three week build phase for your product, and five
people will contribute to this phase. Assuming each person is available to put in
30 hours of work each week, and assuming there will be meetings and
interruptions that will take up some of their work time. You estimate that you
have 450 hours of build time or capacity.

A story is a narrative that you write as a product manager, which identifies the
work to be done and who will benefit from it.

Format for user stories: "As a [user], I want some [feature] so that I can get
some [value]."

As a teacher, I need to be able to change the visibility of a graded activity on

the calendar to hide it from students.

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 While adding features, something may come up that could be an issue. You
need to have a way for the engineers to create fake events, to be able to test
the app, this would be a feature that would never be used by N-users, but it is
critical to be able to test the app quickly.

So you create an internal story.

As an engineer, I need to be able to create a fake set of graded activities to test

the app.

When you have all of these stories created, you need to score them, ask your
build team how much capacity they need to make the feature.

It might have to be a rough guess at the beginning because they probably won't
have mockups or designs to go from yet. To score them, you need to define
how much capacity will be required to design and build them.

Start with general degrees of size, like small, medium, and large. Small could
be a day or two days. Medium could be a week, and large could be two weeks.
Then assign an amount of time to each item to create a complete user story.

Build:

The burndown is a key way for you to monitor the amount of effort put into
building the product, and the amount of work remaining in the sprint or release.

The first thing you need to know is how much time has been put into building
the user stories and work items of the product. The second is how complete the
feature is based on the work that has been done so far.

If you're testing or evaluating a specific feature, build a few scenarios. 

Define the starting point and specific action for the user to do or a

problem for them to solve. 

Make sure it's very clear what you want them to do but don't give them too
much direction. It's best to do the test in person so you can learn from what
the user does and from what they say and how they look. 

Encourage them to think out loud so you can hear what they're
thinking. If your user gets stuck, let them be stuck for a little bit. Don't try

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 and solve the problem for them. If they ask you a question, just like in a
customer meeting during your product research, it's important not to give
them a specific answer.

When you're testing a software product, it's helpful to record the screen. For

mobile products, there are screen mirroring apps you can install to
record what the user does. 

For a physical product, make a video of the test or at the very least, capture

the audio of what the tester is saying. 

The main point of testing with users during the development of your feature
is to make sure you're releasing something that has gone through some
degree of validation. And testing helps prevent the possibility you've
overlooked something that won't have a chance to address until the next
release.

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 Release:

There are a lot of different types of personas that are used in marketing and
product management, but here are some good basic considerations.

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 Give your persona a name.

Give your persona a background.

Define Persona Demographic (Eg: gender, location, income or some other

parameter)

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 Include quotes from your fictional persona. Customer meetings can give
you a persona a voice to make them more tangible and human.

With personas, there are two ways to classify them. First, are they a
primary or secondary persona? 

The primary personas are the ones you're going after the most.

The secondary ones will benefit from the product, but it isn't specifically
targeted for them.

The second categorization is if it is a user persona or a marketing

persona. 

For many technology products, these are one and the same, but for
products designed for teams or enterprise customers, the person that is
making the purchasing decision is often not the end user. 

Take our school app for example, depending on how the app is made, it
might be something that is implemented at the school or district level. In
that case, the technology coordinator or another school administrator, would
be the marketing persona, while Mr. Williams, Janet and Zach would be
user personas.

Types of releases:

1. Soft launch

This is when you release the finished product, but you don't tell anyone.

There isn't any advertising or campaigning for the product, it's just there for
people to find on their own.

There are a number of reasons to have a product go through an entire

launch process without fanfare, especially products that are released in app
stores.

A Soft Launch lets you make sure your product is approved and listed by
the ecosystem vendor before you make a big splash about it. You also can
see how discoverable the product is and if there are any initial reactions to
it.

2. Full launch

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 This is when you release your product and marketing at the same time. 

In this scenario, you do little to no marketing or advertising before the

product launches and product availability is timed with your
communication. 

The Full Launch pushes everything at the same time with the clear call to
action being to acquire the product.

3. Modified Full launch

An effective way to build momentum and excitement for the product before
it's released.

With this method, you can promote features, early beta releases, behind the
scenes stories of how the product is made and share what your testers are
saying about the product before it's released.

4. Phased release strategy

If you've already released the product, you might consider a phased release
strategy.

This is when you initially choose to focus your marketing on a small

percentage of users and then grow that over time.

This is common practice for web based products or apps where a certain
number of users are able to update to the new version of an existing
product while others remain on the older one.

The phase release strategy gives you a way to test and evaluate the
audience response to a product before it goes live to a 100% of the users.

Refine:

Whom can we ask questions:

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 Evaluate product usage analytics

1. Sections of your product which aren't used at all

2. Monitor Session Time (it would drop after early times, but it should stay
steady at some point of time)

3. User flow maps

Looking at product usage statistics is more than just counting the

number of times a product was used and how many users you have,
but it isn't the Holy Grail for product decisions.

Product statistics are trends that create questions that you can ask and
verify with your customers.

Net Promoter Score

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 Asks a simple question to your audience. Would you recommend this
product or service to someone else? 

The answer is evaluated on a numeric scale of one to 10. 

A one means that they would absolutely never recommend the

product. A 10 would mean that they enthusiastically recommend the
product. 

The result of the question is an index, ranging from negative 100 to

positive 100. This percentage value represents how satisfied customers
are with your particular product.

This percentage value represents how satisfied customers are with your
particular product.

The percentage is determined by taking the numeric responses for

each question, and categorizing them into three groups.

The first are the promoters. Anyone that responds to the question
with a nine or a 10 is classified as a promoter. These are your big
fans. They're highly satisfied and will promote your product on your
behalf. The second are the passives.

Anyone that responds with a seven or an eight is a passive. These

individuals like the product, but they aren't going to actively promote it.
They are also potential targets to be poached by competitors.

The last group are the detractors. Anyone that responds with a six or
lower is a detractor. These individuals are actively discouraging others
from using your product. They're likely to promote other products and
can harm your product's reputation, if you're not able to address their
concerns.

NPS is calculated by subtracting, the percentage of detractors from the

percentage of promoters. Passives are ignored.

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 Debt: In many products, especially technology ones, with each release you
incur work that needs to be done to keep the product modern and updated.
These features might not be user facing and are often based on external
factors.

Over time, the amount of technical debt builds and builds. And at some
point you will probably need to address some of these issues.

Sometimes the technical debt is so high that it's actually more resource
effective to start entirely from scratch and build something new. Which
means that you will need to retire the current product and remove it from
the market.

Retire:

Reasons to retire products:

Your customers might be angry or upset at the cancellation of the

product. While you might not be able to address all of their concerns, make

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 the time to provide general guidance on how to migrate to another
product, even if it is a competitor. 

Other options, depending on the type of product you have might be to keep

the product in market, but leave it unsupported. This means that you will no
longer actively develop the product, and it will over time, just stop working. 

Finally, there is the option of making the product open source. Meaning that
you ensure that there are no license restrictions with any of the intellectual
property within your product, and release it to the public, to take over as a
community development project. 

Whatever your reasons and resolutions, the retirement of a product is a key

part of any product lifecycle. As a product manager, it is important to put
your customer first to ensure that they can still be advocates for you in the
future.

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