Product Owner Flashcards
Who is the Product Owner?
A product owner is a member of the Scrum team. PO has a product vision that he is really passionate about, she knows why we are building the product and what problem is gonna solve and for whom.
Which role of the Product Owner on the project?
PO is accountable for effective Product Backlog management.
Which main tasks Product Owner performs in the team?
- Developing and explicitly (явно) communicating the Product Goal.
- Creating and clearly communicating Product Backlog Items.
- Ordering and reordering Product Backlog Items.
- Ensuring that the Product Backlog is transparent, visible and understood.
- Answer questions from the Developers about items in the current Sprint.
- Work with the stakeholders to gather information and opinions, manages expectations.
- Defining which stories to take into development into the upcoming sprint/
Defining which user stories to take into WIP (Kanban). - Saying yes or no to a new feature.
- Maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team
Owns backlog, has final authority (and therefore accountability) in creating and prioritizing backlog items. - Manages dependencies with other Departments, negotiating and reprioritizing as appropriate.
- Defines and validates Acceptance Criteria.
- Accepts the ticket as Done and closes the ticket.
- PO - build the right thing
- Developers - build the things right
- Scrum Master - build it fast (coach) according to the market window
Why is prioritization important?
Prioritization is the process by which potential development items are ranked in order of importance. In terms of product management, this means determining which themes, initiatives, or features should get slotted into the product roadmap and the next set of upcoming product releases.
First of all, there are the relatively endless (относительно бесконечный) set of possible items the product development team could implement. That’s why determining which items in the product backlog actually get worked on, plays an essential part in a product’s overall success (scope creep).
Secondly, a product development team has limited resources and a limited list of things they can work on at once so that items should be prioritized against strategic goals and objectives. This also means that certain items are removed from consideration and not pegged for future work at all (we can refer to the project management triangle: scope, cost, time: every project has its limitations or restrictions).
These decisions profoundly (глубоко) impact the direction of the product, its future traction (тяга) and success.
Prioritization should always be a group effort. The opinions, perspectives, insights, and knowledge of various stakeholders from across the organization add immense (огромная) value to the debates and decisions pertaining to which items get prioritized for the product roadmap.
Which prioritization techniques do you know?
Prioritization workshops are typically led by the product owner or any senior leader.
Some of the most popular prioritization frameworks include:
2×2 Prioritization Matrix (2 by 2)
It uses a priority matrix grid with four quadrants, with the vertical axis labeled “importance” and the horizontal labeled “effort.”
Each quadrant in this grid has one of the following labels:
High value, low effort
Low value, low effort
High value, high effort
Low value, high effort
Everyone then places each backlog item in the appropriate spot, based on the item’s estimated value and the effort required to complete it.
MoSCoW Prioritization
MoSCoW represents four categories of initiatives: must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have, will not have right now, or are “wish list” items. The prioritization group then slots each idea up for consideration into one of these slots, using this scale:
Must-have items are mandatory. These will always be at the top of the to-do list.
Should-have ideas are essential to the product strategy, but the product can function without them for the time being.
Could-have items can also be considered “nice to have.” Their absence doesn’t impact core functionality or user experience, so they can be de-prioritized.
Will not have projects have been ruled out for the immediate future. This declaration keeps them from sneaking back in due to scope creep.
Story Mapping
Story Mapping puts the emphasis on user stories rather than explicit (явные) features and functionality. It emphasizes the customer journey and user experience, enabling the team to view the product from the user perspective.
This method often finds holes in the customer journey where users might get frustrated. It can then provide detailed context regarding how different types of users engage with the product. And since it’s a collaborative, iterative exercise, it gets the whole team involved.
What is MVP?
Simply put, Minimum Viable Product is an imperfect product that still performs the main function and is already presented to users. The key idea of an MVP is to create a product with minimal effort, offer it to customers, and then refine it.
What is the difference between MVP and PoC (Proof of Concept)?
PoC is everything that proves the viability of an idea: pre-orders (предварительные), investments on crowdfunding platforms, market research.
The founders of Dropbox showed the audience a video about the functionality of a non-existent service and received 75 thousand subscribers. This served as a proof of concept.
PoC is used in MVP development: they collect evidence while working on a product or before launch, as is the case with Dropbox.
The MVP itself is not an argument for an idea, but a product that can be used. It is sold to customers for money.
What do you know about hypotheses?
Creating a new product or introducing new functionality begins with identifying existing problems and user requests. Then we put forward hypotheses: why something needs to be introduced, removed, changed. For example, to increase some indicators, improve selected metrics, make the process more convenient. Usually a product manager or business analyst finds and forms various hypotheses on their own, and then these assumptions are transformed into experiments that the team decides.
How to validate hypotheses?
There are many different options for testing these hypotheses.
It is very good to involve the team at the stage of making assumptions, because each participant has his own point of view. Developers can suggest, for example, that the proposed cannot be implemented due to technical limitations or it will take too long to check, and the QA team will help to see the shortcomings (недостатки) in the logic.
Team discussion and criticism help to prioritize, but still the main screening tool is validation on real users. The fastest and easiest way is interviews, experiments with traffic, repositioning in advertising. At a more mature stage of the product, hypotheses are validated by prototypes: shown to people, tested, studied the reaction.
The approach to the formation of an MVP through various kinds of constant screening of hypotheses allows you to choose the right direction and not lose money.
What is Roadmap?
Roadmap is a visualization of the project, its overview.
A roadmap is a key document for the implementation of a company’s strategy and contains basic information about the project.
Its goal is to convey (передать) ideas and progress on tasks to team members, the client, and others. And also focus all stakeholders on achieving a specific goal.
What is the difference between Roadmap and Project plan?
Project plan is about dates, details and data. Roadmap is about goals, objectives and benefits. To create an accurate roadmap, it’s important to focus on results instead of execution.
Main components of the roadmap:
1. Strategy
Why was the project conceived (задуман), what are its prospects?
2. Result
What will be the result of carrying out and completing the project?
3. Project progress
Typically, the progress of a project displayed on a timeline is the chronological order of the key periods of the project.
4. Potential risks
These can be challenges related to project activities, team members, resources, or external factors.
They will give a clear understanding to colleagues and customers about the purpose of the project, help everyone interested to keep abreast (быть в курсе) and be aware of changes and innovations in time.
It is important to be able to present the roadmap in different variations, depending on the team or audience.
Project Plan:
Goals and project objectives.
Success metrics.
Stakeholders and roles.
Scope and budget.
Milestones, deliverables, and project dependencies.
Timeline and schedule.
Communication plan.
Which tools do you know for building the Roadmap?
Platforms for creating a project roadmap:
Excel template
GanttPRO
Roadmap Planner
Hygger
For which purpose do you use product metrics?
Product metrics are indicators which are used to track product development and sustainability (устойчивость). Each metric should be actionable, that is should show how the product can be improved. That’s why every business needs its own set of metrics.
Which product metrics do you know?
Common metrics:
Customer Acquisition Cost shows the cost of acquiring (приобретение) one customer.
CAC = the amount of the advertising budget spent on attracting new customers / the number of attracted customers
Retention rate (коэффициент удержания) shows how many users continue to use the product after a certain period of time.
RR = number of active users at the end of the period / number of active users at the beginning of the period * 100%
Churn rate (скорость оттока) shows the outflow of customers.
CR = (1 - number of users at the end of the period / number of users at the beginning of the period) * 100%
Lifetime value shows the profit that the client brings for the entire period of using the product. Formulas may vary.
For example, for an online store: LTV = average bill * repeat purchase frequency * customer lifetime
Net promoter score shows how willing your customers are to share their product experience. Have users answer how willing they are to recommend your product on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is not ready at all, and 10 is sure to recommend. The answers will reveal three groups of customers - critics (from 0 to 6), neutrals (7-8) and promoters (9-10).
NPS = Total Promoters (%) - Total Critics (%). An NPS of more than 50% is considered good.
Daily Active Users and Monthly Active User - the number of unique users who use the product per day and per month, excluding repeat sessions.
Session duration - a metric that shows how much time the user spent in the product.
It only makes sense in the context of a particular business. For example, for Netflix, session time is important: the more a user watches content, the higher the value of a subscription. The task of Uber, on the contrary, is to reduce session time.
E-commerce
Visits = the number of sessions on the site.
Orders = the number of orders for a certain period of time.
Average order value = the average monetary value of one order, “average bill”.
AOV = Order Revenue / Number of Orders
Conversion rate = the percentage of visits to the site that ended with a target action, that is, a purchase.
CR = number of visitors who completed the target action / total number of visitors * 100%.
Repeat customers - the percentage of visitors who became repeat customers, that is, they made more than one order.
RC = number of customers who made more than one order / number of all customers
Shopping cart abandonment - the number of users who added a product to the cart but did not place an order.
Checkout abandonment rate - the number of users who filled the cart, reached the checkout, but did not make a purchase.
Mobile apps
Downloads - the number of app downloads.
Activation rate - the percentage of users who launched the application after installing it.
AR = number of activations / number of downloads * 100%
Sticky Factor - a metric that measures how often people return to the app.
SF = DAU / MAU * 100%
Uninstalls - the number of users who installed the application, but for some reason did not register in it and do not use it.
Conversion Rate Install to Event
Web-sites with content
Page views (views) - the number of visits to a particular page on the site. By the number of views, you can understand which topics attract more users.
Unique visitors (unique visitors) - the total number of visitors who viewed a particular page on the site (excluding repeated sessions).
Average page view duration (average time on the page) - the time that the user spends on average on one page of the site. Shows how users interact with the content: whether they are carefully reading it or just browsing. If on some pages the indicator is higher than on others, it means that some content elements are more interesting for visitors.
Page depth (browsing depth) - the average number of pages that the user visited per session. Shows how interesting the content is in general. If the indicator is low, it is worth working on content linking, design and navigation.
Bounce rate (bounces) - the percentage of users who left the site by viewing only the login page. Shows problems with recycling - the proportion of visitors who consumed more than one piece of content. If a high bounce rate can be the norm in a blog (a person came for specific information, received it and left), then for the media this is an extremely bad sign.
New and repeat visitors (new and returning visitors) - the percentage ratio between new and returning visitors. Content should not only attract new users, but also retain old ones.
Likes and shares in social networks - indicators of the virality of the content, how popular it is with the audience. Shares are more important than likes because they show that someone not only found the content interesting, but also expanded their reach.
Mentions in social networks and media. They show how high quality the content is and how strongly it is associated with the brand. You also need to pay attention to the authors of mentions, mood and context in order to work out the negative.
Incoming requests - offers of cooperation with a media product. The clearest indicator of content quality, whether you’re invited to write new material, share knowledge, give interviews, or do something else.
User comments. They help to identify the most interesting content — the one that provokes discussion. The number of comments shows the engagement of the audience better than likes and shares, because if the user took the time to write a comment, then the content motivated him.
Where to look: on the website and in social networks.
Reposts - when someone quotes you; refers to your content as a source or reprints it in its entirety. Shows the quality of the published content.
Where to look: in search engines.
- Conversion Rate (conversion) - the percentage of users who performed a useful action after interacting with the content: subscribed, registered, clicked on the banner, and so on.
How to calculate: To measure conversion, you need to set up goals in the analytics system. Conversion is always a “transition” from one stage to another. For example, if you need a conversion to a subscription, you need to divide the number of subscriptions for the period by the number of visitors to the page (pages) with the subscription form.
- Cost Per Acquisition (price of attraction) - the money you spend on attracting one lead. CAC characterizes the cost of attracting a client, and CPA, on the other hand, characterizes the cost of obtaining a certain conversion - for example, registering on a site or activating an account. The metric helps to determine the most profitable promotion channels.
How to calculate: CPA = (content cost + publishing and promotion costs + technical costs) / number of new leads
Этот термин пришел к нам из английского языка. Слово переводится как «инициатива», «намек» и будто подталкивает к совершению действия. На практике лид — это пользователь, заинтересованный в определенных товарах и услугах. Лиды показывают интерес к продукту или услуге различными способами.
API
- API calls - the total number of API calls for a given period of time. You need to understand the number of calls for each method to plan the load on the infrastructure.
- Failure rate - the number of failed API calls. The metric gives an understanding of how much the number of unsuccessful calls to one of the microservices has grown. Perhaps a bug has appeared, or the microservice has become too popular for some reason. On the example of OMNICOMM: after adding information about the temperature regime in the refrigerator, retail users began to request the “Vehicle Status” method every hour. Another example: after the services that manage the fleet at the airport connected to the API, the number of calls to the “Vehicle Location” method increased several times.
How to calculate: Failure rate = number of failed calls / total number of calls
- Support tickets - the number of support tickets that resulted from problems with the API. It is important to divide appeals into consultations and incidents. All errors on the product site should be caught by autotests and monitoring. The number of bugs, more precisely, their absence, is also considered an indicator of the business as a whole and can be used in KPIs.
- Response time - service response time to a client request. Changes to the service may degrade the quality of its work. In addition, the developer can write a suboptimal database query or overload the microservice.
How to calculate: The difference between call time and response time. Reference time can be obtained during load testing.
- The number of requests per unit of time. Calling the method too often can negatively affect the availability of the service for clients. Third-party developers do not always use the service optimally. Also, a sharp increase in this metric can signal an external attack.
How do you track product metrics?
There are various product analytics software that helps to:
Observe and understand how users are interacting with your website and applications.
Collect and aggregate data to capture trends and patterns that lead to less churn, reduced friction, more conversions, higher adoption, and goal completions.
Segment users by stage within your funnel and observe their journey closer.
Whatfix
Amplitude Analytics
Google Analytics
UXCam
