PM Flashcards
What does a product manager do?
I believe that my responsibility as a product manager is to ensure that the product meets customer needs and business objectives. My job is to completely digest and understand a product through and through to be able to produce valuable features for users through data, metrics, user feedback, and research while mapping out the vision to my development team.
Why do you want this job, and how does it fit your overall career trajectory?
- I believe I possess the skillset needed to deliver value to not only this position but this company
- I love your company’s values and how you humanize your employees
- I’ve been contracting for most of my career and I’m ready to settle down now. I’m looking for a solid home. Unlike before where the job description takes priority, I put a lot of thought into the companies I’m applying for now and take a deeper look into their mission and values to make sure I’m a good fit all around. I’ve been grateful enough to work with great teams and have grown such a strong appreciation for them
Why is it important to use metrics to back features?
No matter how long you’ve been in the game, you really have no clue how well a feature will do without data to back it up.
1) As humans we often form our own biases that can disrupt our decision making process without solid data
2) Using data is a clear way to validate your points when talking to stakeholders. Pushing features off of what a stakeholder may “think” they need is not a stable way to make product decisions
3) You have something to use as a measuring gauge when the feature is pushed to production. Does user feedback match up with the metrics? Is the feature usability being widely adopted by users?
Tell me about yourself/ your career
Hi my name is Jessica Ahenkorah I’ve been in the product development space going on 8 years now. I got my start at Marriott where I began as an intern. I instantly fell in love with my role and picked up on my responsibilities relatively quickly so 6 months in I was promoted to a Business Analyst. There, I worked on the development of the loyalty member’s app where some of my responsibilities included
*managing communication between cross functional teams such as ux/ui, engineering, database architects and stakeholders,
*participated in requirement elicitation processes, translating those requirements into concise user stories with acceptance criteria
*stayed up to date on current trends and conducted thorough research in the market to have input on dynamic feature creation for the application
*I performed various tasks when it came to configuration, automation, and integration through our crm
*I did a lot of process modeling, including as-is and to-be diagrams and flowcharts showing the current state of the product and potential
- conducting on-site interviews with real customers to identify pain points and take the feedback back to my team to dissect so we could identify areas to provide value
In 2020, I landed my current role as a Product Owner at Navy Federal. Here I work with the fraud department developing an investigative case management system. My responsibilities here include
*Again, lots of process modeling, including product roadmaps, flowcharts, uml diagrams, giving the team insight into the future and the potential of the product while keeping the company vision in line
*I developed a deep understanding of the product, it’s functionalities, its users, and stakeholder expectations to deliver the high quality solutions and convey product vision precisely
*Outlining strategies for process automation within the system to streamline user workflow
*actively participating in scrum ceremonies including sprint planning, sprint retrospective, sprint reviews
*I made sure the vision of the product and the delivery goals of each sprint was kept clear throughout the development process,
*I fostered collaborative workspaces by lead brainstorming and discovery workshops with my team to come up with creative and innovative solutions
*I create various pieces of documentation that support the application including user guides that walk new users through the functionalities and capabilities of the application, application glossary, BRDs, and executive presentations.
*staying current with market trends and user feedback so I’m always prepared to provide solutions that are backed by data
*remaining on high alert to answer any questions that may come in from stakeholders or the development team
What kind of metrics did you track at Marriott
Active Users
Sessions Per User
Session Duration
Feature adoption
How do you determine what customers want and need?
Through understanding of the product and user feedback including what the user needs in order to perform their roles effectively. I conduct user interviews often, we have various positions that utilize the system so talking to each of them and getting feedback that pertains to their individual roles really helps to shape a vision of what they need as they also let me know their wants
Tell me about a time you had trouble building consensus and how you overcame it.
We recently just experienced an example of this. So in the application we have a search bar that contains both a general search and an advanced search. The problem was that if the user only had the first and last name of an entity the general search won’t be able to find their specific record. They will have to dig through 100s of records of other entities with similar name in order to find the record they are looking for. Which was becoming extremely frustrating to some users. In the advanced search, users are able to add different identifying number and personal information to further narrow the results. But in the case that the first and last name was all they had it’d make their jobs difficult. When I brought this issue to business there were big pushbacks. In order to specifically
Tell me about a time you automated a process
Within the system I was working in process automation was constant. The business wanted to make user workflow was as efficient, accurate, and as timely as possible. When it comes to process automation, I like to get a deep understanding of the current workflow we are trying to simplify and in what way the user would like to benefit from it. From that I go into heavy market research to discover the various solutions that we could use to aid us in completing the vision, if other heavy hitters in the market have implemented similar processes and how it’s working for them, and then brainstorming to piece it all together and personalizing my findings to fit our unique product.
Tips/lead automaton
How would you prioritize?
Prioritizing can be stressful at times especially when you have big issues such as user needs vs business objectives competing for favor. I like to start by looking at the bigger picture and refreshing myself on where we are trying to go. What is the ultimate goal? Do these feature requests or enhancements align with the team/company goals? After redefining the vision, I like to hone in a bit more and ask what are our goals for this sprint or this quarter? I then scale the requirements based on impact and urgency and the value they will provide vs the high-level amount of effort that will be needed to produce them
“Sell me this [blank].”
What’s your biggest failure as a product manager, and why did it happen?
So when I first arrived to Navy Federal, like I stated previously I like to look at current product guides, conduct a document analysis by taking a deep dive into current workflows processes, looking into background and past information about the business and the project so that is what I did.
When it was time for me to present my first automative process model to stakeholders I soon realized that I had left out an extremely important set of roles that belonged to our consumer fraud team which completely invalidated the process. I mistakenly overlooked them during my review of the product which was pretty big especially since it was my first presentation. Since then I have become extremely detail oriented and take extreme pride in fully understanding every piece of a product in order to implement impactful solutions
What’s one of your favorite products, and what’s something you’d change about it?
The iPhone. The range of the iPhone and its ability to consistently adapt with changing times is impeccable. At its lowest it solves the simplest problem. It’s a phone. You can make traditional calls, text, leave voice messages to loved ones and co workers. It has taken something so simple and has built on in like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Great design, fantastic features powered by AI, accessibilities that can be customized to unique user needs, a user-friendly interface that can be adapted by users as young as 8 months and as aged as 100+.
How do you communicate your product strategy?
So communicating product strategy is all about the audience, who am I speaking to? Depending on who I’m speaking to I like to tune my level of detail to best convey the strategy to their level of understanding. For executive and business stakeholders I like to use presentations that include various pieces of data visualization. More often than not this audience is extremely busy and I want them to be able to look at piece of information and pick up on it within 10 seconds of looking at it as I walk them through it at a high level, engaging in important details as needed as well as answering any complex questions they may have.
With communicating product strategy to my team I include a lot more details and more thorough pieces of visualizations to make sure we are all on the same page and working towards calculated and precise goals with little room for understanding error and building an atmosphere of creating solutions that are backed by data
What will you do in the first 90 days if we hire you?
For me, the first 30, 60, and 90 days are all about getting strapped in. Becoming familiar with the product, the workflow, the people, and the communication pipeline is top priority. It’s a humble period for me to ask as many questions as I can and just learn while acting as a powerful aid. I know what I am capable of and the value I believe I can bring but I feel like the most impactful PMs know to leverage their communication skills and that is not always breaking into the door trying to dominant with words but sometimes taking the backseat to learn and observe in order properly equipt yourself to produce solid fruit for your team and product later. I plan on being here for a long time not a good time, well actually both lol
What is your product strategy?
My product strategy is mission, vision, users, market and data analysis, and define and roadmap
