Product Management Class 3

Product Management Class 3

• A good product manager needs experience in at least one area (e.g., UX, tech, business), passion for all three areas, and familiarity with practitioners in all areas.
• The product management process involves a discovery and framing phase, followed by delivery iterations.
• The discovery phase involves understanding the problem, target audience, and potential solutions.
• The framing phase focuses on defining the problem, ideation, synthesizing insights, and shaping the system that addresses the problem.
• The delivery phase involves iterative cycles of user research, design, and development to continuously improve the solution.

Discovery & Framing

• This process tracks the journey from initial problem statement to a well-defined product proposition.
• There is an evident pattern of fluctuation and growth.

How Product Management Works

• A tailored discovery and framing approach solves product challenges.
• The sequence includes pre-project goals, discovery workshops, framing, and delivery iterations – each step crucial to the process.
• Iterations involve continued user research, design, and development.

Double Diamond Process

• The process consists of two divergent and two convergent phases.
• The first divergent identifies problems, and then the problem must be defined in more detail.
• The second divergent identifies solutions or possible approaches to the problem.
• The second convergent phase narrows down the choices, resulting in an optimal solution.

4 Phases of the Double Diamond Model

• Discover: Explore and understand the problem by researching users, competition, and industry trends. Gathering insights into the problem statement, user needs and desired outcomes and the current market landscape.
• Define: Analyze the discovered information and refine the problems stated. Identify user profiles, needs and goals and prioritize the most important solutions.
• Develop: Generate ideas and strategies to resolve the identified issues. Build prototypes and explore solutions. Design solutions, flows, and user flows.
• Deliver: Test, implement, refine, and launch the product. Conduct testing sessions, gather feedback, and create the final product/solution.

Discovery Techniques

• Techniques used in the discovery phase include customer interviews, product analytics, competitor analysis, the "five whys" technique, brainstorming, prioritization techniques, prototyping, and usability testing.

Metrics & North Stars

• Essential metrics for product success include Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), retention rate, churn rate, conversion rate, traffic (paid/organic), daily active users, and monthly active users.
• A north star metric defines the relationship between customer problems and revenue generation.

North Star Examples

• Examples of north star metrics include total hours viewed for Netflix, weekly active riders for Uber, gross merchandise volume for Amazon, daily active users for Facebook, and number of messages sent for WhatsApp.

Example of Changed North Stars

• Initial metrics, like DVD rentals for Netflix, have evolved; present-day metrics reflect streaming time.
• Nokia's failure to adapt its metric to touch screen mobiles was a strategic mistake.

Product Lifecycle

• The product lifecycle represents the overall time a product remains available to consumers, beginning with its introduction and concluding with its removal.
• Stages include introduction, growth, maturity, and decline, each characterized by distinctive sales trends.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

• MVP represents a core product build strategy, focusing on rapid iteration and testing of core functionality.
• The riskiest assumption test (RAT) is used to check and evaluate assumptions about the product, customers, and business model before finalizing the product.
• The reverse double diamond approach is a design process that focuses on understanding the user needs and then design and build a minimum viable product(MVP).

Dynamic Product Discovery

• Dynamic product discovery is a continuous, integrated and data-driven approach to discovery, continuously updating product roadmaps based on new data.
• It involves integrating all relevant data about the product in one place - business objectives, customer feedback, sales demand, design, and development.
• The process focuses on team involvement in all product phases.

How to define a North Star Metric

• Eight steps help in finding a relevant north star metric.
• Questions include when end-results are reached for customers, if the metric applies to all customers, if it is measurable, optimal frequency, and impact from external factors.
• The crucial questions relate to growth alignment, impact on the pirate funnel, and metric frequency.