About Product Management

Question 1

What is product management?

Answer 1

Product management is about:

• discovering a product that is valuable, usable and feasible
• ensuring that it gets made
• and reporting back on how the users respond

Question 2

Why is product management important?

Answer 2

Because it makes sure that what is being built matters and that increases the chance of a product being a success

Question 3

What is strategy?

Answer 3

Finding options and prioritizing options and measure of the option taken was a success

Question 4

What should a product manager have?

Answer 4

• strategic thinking
• collaboration / facilitator / communicator
• empathy, curiosity, humble

Question 5

How do you communicate product strategy?

Answer 5

I make sure the problem is very well known, and I try to explain it in the most simple way (even with some story telling) with quantitative and qualitative data backing it up.

But it doesn’t happen in one announcement, it’s a process. If I am sharing it to humans, I might have to explain in different ways and several times.
It needs to be a conversation, responses need to be heard as well.

Question 6

How do you determine what users want and need?

Answer 6

I observe existing data, if there isn’t enough data, I look for more.

I can interview customers, make surveys, do focus groups, follow users.

Competition might give me some clues as well.

Then I map user flows or make a user story map.

The ultimate validation is introducing the product on the market and see how users respond, but also the most expensive.

Question 7

What are the identifiable differences between a product manager and a project manager?

Answer 7

Product management is about strategy. Discovering options, prioritizing those options and reporting back on their success.

Project management is about tactics.
Breaking a plan into actionable items; estimate their effort; navigate interdependencies and making sure they get done.

A product manager also needs to do project management, he’s also responsible for making sure things get done.

Question 8

What are the important elements of a competitive analysis?

Answer 8

Identifying:

• who they are
• what to they offer: even feature by feature
• their business strategies and results (prices, numbers of users, expanding to other markets, building new features? etc)

Doing a swot analysis on each of them.

Question 9

How do you prioritize something?

Answer 9

I would first discard the items that do not align with the company vision.
Prioritization cannot be done in isolation. It needs to be part of the strategic planning. What is the outcome we want?

Then, in a simple way, I would classify each item in terms of feasibility, desirability and business viability.
Then I would prioritize accordingly.