This tutorial is a complete understanding of skills and techniques in the Product Management process to develop and launch a product:
Product management is the process within the organization that enables the capability of various phases of product development, planning, and product release in the market. We can consider these phases of product life-cycle management.
In this article, we will understand product management techniques along with the various skills that are essential to understanding the product growth mindset.
This article will be beneficial to product managers and technical product owners.
Table of Contents:
What Is Product Management
Product Management Techniques
Product management has various types of stages in every industry to transform the idea into a concept phase to develop and launch a product.
Each phase has a different type of action, for example: Establishing a strategy, setting a concept, starting the product development, launching it to the market, etc. As product managers, we should understand each phase’s requirement from the stakeholders and define the proper strategy we need to understand the essential techniques.
#1) Solid understanding of the Domain: To be a successful product manager with core knowledge and experience in the domain, make them the (Subject Matter Expert). It helps them to have an depth understanding of the user requirements.
Understanding the cross-functional team and knowledge about the upstream and downstream process is also the right approach to understanding the concept before defining the strategy of the product.
#2) Communication: Maintain regular communication with the functional consultant, domain product head, and directly from the business users and stakeholders about the requirements. Asking the right questions about the product to the business stakeholder is the best communication technique for understanding the product requirements.
#3) Develop a product understanding mindset: Think like a product mindset person. Understanding the vision and handling everything like a product is the best expertise to handle the responsibilities of the product owner. Product management necessitates a functional knowledge of marketing, business analysis, leadership, software development, and UX design capabilities.
We can get knowledge of how your current work presents to the overall productivity of these operations. Using the skill of a product mindset provides the ability to implement the best decision-making steps for the product manager.
#4) Backlog and prioritize the Product. A product backlog is a consolidated list of the detail the requirements along with the details about the improvement of the solution. This is the primary process of the product development stage.
After maintaining the product backlog, the Product Manager has the responsibility to define and set the priority organize it on each backlog item, and divide it into phases and sprints. It is a dominant and streamlined Agile process that provides the fast and smooth development of the product.
#5) Leadership: Leadership skills are essential for encouraging and stimulating your team. Product managers in all ways, have to be driving the cross-functional teams. It involves the representatives from the development team, engineering team, product team, sales and marketing team, and other teams.
Leadership is crucial in getting every team member on the same page and with the best product thinking direction and working towards the same intent and vision of the successful completion of the product.
#6) Flexibility: Product managers, have to be flexible when certain requirements and priorities change. For example, one day there’s a certain change in the priority, and the next day, there are changes in the requirements.
When the product requirements and priorities evolve daily, particularly one day if there’s a certain change there’s the priority and the next day there’s something different. Product managers need to follow up with changes and stay flexible and adjust to ensure products perform and deploy in a relevant time and productively.
#7) Writing technical specifications and requirements: Product goals are a vital part of a product manager’s role, but without knowledge about the technical experience and unclear requirements, products can not be successful and can break out and become stuck in a pre-production environment.
To overcome these obstacles, the product manager should build technical product blueprints and requirements in the most proper manner way.
They should transform the requirement into an epic, features, and a user story with the proper real-time plot using the agile standard tools, it can provide the best management for the team to develop the product and they can deliver the application in more responsive ways.
#8) Problem-solving mindset: Product managers should have the ability of problem-solving capabilities and a strong mindset for solving a problem with the team members.
In some situations, if the application developer writes the code, if they cannot find the solution in some critical scenario, a Product manager should help them to deep-dive the problem and understand the code and assist them.
On the other hand, if there is a requirement for creating mock-ups or developing a prototype with the POC (Proof Of Concept, they should have the intelligence to develop it.
#9) Leadership capabilities: A product manager, should lead and motivate the team during the hurdle time of delivery of the product. They should understand the developer and testers’ challenges and provide them with the best mentorship.
#10) Constant learning: To be a successful product manager, they should have the capability of instant learning, and provide a quicker solution. They should have experience of technical expertise and should know the current IT trends. For example, AI, RPA, and Data science domain expertise.
#11) Take a product vision and inspire others: As product managers, should know the complete product vision and communicate to the team about the product plan, and strategy, and share the latest update to the team about the goals of the product. They should inspire others with their problem-solving approach and should have the responsibility to clear their doubts in case of requirement change.
#12) Capabilities to generate KPIs: To be a successful product manager, they should have the intelligence to understand the business requirement, transform them into the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) share them to the business, and get the sign-off and share to the teams, and mentor them to define the UI and create the mock-ups.
#13) Define the requirements for each phase: A product manager should write the (PVD) Product Vision Document for each type of phase, define the MVP (Minimal Viable Product), and execute it in all phases as per the business requirements.
#14) Convert the requirements into Epic and Features: Product managers should have the qualities to determine the Epic with each type of product feature corresponding to the respective stories. All features and stories should be concise and clear and they should be more understandable.
#15) Fundamental technical skills for a product manager: Product managers need to continuously improve their expertise in technology with problem-solving techniques.
Here is the list of technical skills which can help to be a successful product manager. These skills can them stay competitive.
- Understanding of web and mobile development: Product managers should know web and mobile-based applications. No need to write the code, but they would need to know the process and setup of developing the software application. This awareness can allow them to design the project and define the timelines, create scope, and the efficiency of scaling a product up or down, and also it can encourage them to set the preferences of the tasks.
- Knowledge of DevOps and CI-CD Automation: Understanding the DevOps and CI-CD automation ideas can lead to a unique practice for the product managers, as they can deliver the product most easily and securely ways. CI-CD automation enables the pipeline setup of the blue-green production code to publish with smooth deployment. We can recognize the old version of the application as a blue environment, and the modern version we can consider as a green environment. With the help of it, they can analyze with the stakeholders in a shorter time after the business sign-off, and they can shift to the final version of the application.
- Analytical skills and strategic thinking skills: They must be competent to estimate the data, and information and deliver the best insights to their team. This inspires them to ensure that products contribute to a more acceptable value.
- Understanding of UX/UI design capabilities: Being a Successful product manager should have the abilities of UX design, they should understand how they can transform the requirement in a UX and UI design ways, which can help the application development team to define the business requirement in better ways.
What Is A Product Roadmap
Maintaining the Product Backlog, defining the business user and stakeholder administration, and defining forecasting the product requirements in the quarterly and high-level goals, are roles and daily responsibilities of the product manager.
For tracking the progress, handling the business expectations, and communicating with the action plan, there are plenty of tools and techniques that can be useful. Developing product roadmaps is the best and most convenient mechanism to define and set goals in more effective ways.
The roadmap should maintain the products’ scope and vision and it supports the Product managers to manage their stakeholders. The roadmap also makes it more comfortable to organize the growth of different products and it encourages transparency to accomplish customer expectations.
Further Reading => Most Popular Product Management Tools
Suggestions And Key Points
Here is the list of suggestions and key points for Product Roadmaps:
- Originate with your product vision.
- Define and endorse your product strategy.
- Sharpen goals and advantages by performing a goal-determined product roadmap.
- Determine a consistent story about the growth of your product.
- Define the foundational setup of your requirement with each quarter-wise.
- Define the descriptive plan in terms of insightful visualization with each quarter-wise.
- Keep it simple and more accurate in crisp inline words, and avoid too detailed requirements.
- Have the strength to say yes to everything to expect unnecessary plans and features in the roadmap.
- Make sure to add timelines, dates, or deadlines to your roadmap. It should be timely organized with each quarter which you want to deliver.
- Make sure your roadmap is measured by combining measuring purposes.
- Define the T-shirt sizing on each requirement with each feature, based on the team members’ availability and skills.
- Evaluate and accommodate your product roadmap regularly.
What Is The Use Of Persona
In product management, a persona is a portrait of a product’s expected business users and customers. We can consider it as the character that illustrates a user as a relatable person.
A standardized persona helps to understand the product’s development, defines the goals, and helps them to understand the needs, behavior, and of a particular type of user.
Types of Personas:
- Primary Personas: The product captures all their needs and goals.
- Secondary Personas: The product performs most of its needs with minor adjustments.
- Tertiary Personas: Supplemental user, not the focus of the product.
How to build a user persona
To develop a persona, we would need to understand the user, for this, we need to examine their specific roles and preferences and certain time zones. It can have different roles, with different UIs landing pages or insights.
Below is an example we can consider:
Product Manager vs Project Manager: Differences
The project manager manages product development. They have the responsibility for the development of the project from the initial phase to the launch phase. They manage the Software Life cycle management (SDLC) using the waterfall or Agile models.
They have to maintain the project tracking progress build the project workflow and provide updates on the project completion to the organization. They have to determine the milestone of the project, estimate the timeframe of the project quarterly, and define the risk mitigations or any challenges during the project development with the assurance of the project delivery.
The product manager is accountable for product success. Product managers develop the product strategy and are involved in product continuation and solve the business problems. With the capability of a long-term complete product vision mindset, they create the product life cycle development process.
They create the roadmap closely work with the cross-functional teams, and have the capability of understanding the technical workflow requirements.
What Is Product Thinking
Product thinking is about the thought process of solving a problem in different ways. Below are the best examples we can use in our real-time daily problem-solving practices:
- Define a clear vision: Here we have to know the answers to the question:
- What do you want to achieve after solving this problem and why do you want to?
- Define your plan and strategy: Here we should know the strategy for this question:
- How will you solve this problem?
- Define your business aim: Here, we should define the objective and aim
- What do you want to achieve?
- Define your problem statement: Here, we should be clear about the problem statement:
- How will you achieve this goal?
- Define your features: Here we should know the features that we need to deliver
- What type of features exactly do you want to deliver?
- Define your Target Audience: Here we should know who will be the audience and the users who will use this product.
- Who are the users you are focusing on?
Conclusion
In this product management tutorial, we understood the techniques and best insights about the responsibilities and skill sets for being a successful product manager. This article is beneficial to the audience who want to be technical product owners or product managers in their respective areas.