Summary
In this post, we’ll go over what is product management, specifically software product management, and how it’s used to drive success at many tech companies today.
What is product management?
Product management is the end-to-end process of discovering, planning, developing, launching, and iterating on a product or feature.
A feature is a specific functionality that has a benefit for a user. An example of a feature is the “subscribe now” button on the bottom of this page.
A product is a catch-all term that is comprised of multiple features that are implemented to serve a set of needs and users. An example of a product is Substack, where you as a reader can digest content from authors with no ads
You can infer that a product manager is an individual who leads this product development process in an organization and works with their fellow colleagues, usually on the design, engineering, and product management teams, to make it happen.
Product development process
Diving deeper into the definition above, product management can be described as six main phases:
(1) Discovery
A lot of product management should be spent in this bucket. Discovery includes:
User Research - talking with or interviewing customers and users, understanding their processes and thought process, and understanding their pain-points.
Market Research - analyzing direct and indirect competitors, non-competitors, and other companies that are solving for similar problems or users.
(2) Planning
Planning is distilling your learnings from the Discovery phase into product requirements (or solutions) and figuring out where that work should fall across your product roadmap.
Example: Through user research, you find out that your user spends a lot of time manually calculating taxes and fees for their clients. You determine that the viable solution is to integrate with an off-the-shelf system that does the calculations automatically.
(3) Design
Design applies to those features that need product design work. This is typically led by your partner-in-crime product designer, but they typically look to you for ensuring the user experience (UX) makes sense, and it’s actually solving the intended problem.
This is also a great stage to start shopping around any designs (even low-fidelity) with actual end-users to get feedback and improve the overall product flow.
Why? This allows you to do user validation and de-risk the chance of your product not being effective in the real world. This will also save you a ton of time and resources in the long-run, and your engineering team will thank you later.
(4) Development
Development is prioritizing the work as defined in the Planning phase with your fellow design and engineering teams.
Development includes two stages of testing:
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) - putting the product or feature in the hands of the intended user, so you can make sure that (a) it solves the problem effectively and (b) it is usable (and not confusing) to the user.
Reliability Testing - ensuring that the product or feature is working as intended from a code perspective.
(5) Launch
Launch is getting the product or feature to the finish line and releasing it to your intended user(s).
This also opens up the opportunity for real user feedback and validating (or invalidating) the hypotheses you made around solving the intended pain-points.
(6) Iteration
Iteration is taking real user feedback from Launch and figuring out how to improve the performance and value of your product or feature.
Example: You implement a new “Sign up for free trial” button on your website in efforts to improve lead generation. Based on the click-through rate, you infer that users aren’t always seeing this button, so you increase the size and, as a result, increase the click-through rate.
What does success look like?
You might be asking yourself - what is the true purpose of product management, and what is a product manager trying to impact? The short answer is - it depends on the company and product.
Product managers are typically tied to overall business objectives. For example, there is a product team (amongst many product teams) at Lyft dedicated to the driver growth. You can probably expect that they are tied to global driver supply and overall retention of drivers. There is another product team that focuses solely on the fleet management system of the Express Drive program, which issues rental cars to Lyft drivers. This team is building a platform that ultimately helps reduce operational cost and speed up the onboarding process of a new driver in the Express Drive program.
Product managers typically are focused on improving a single product area. One example is at Rivian, my team was solely focused on the customer delivery experience of a Rivian. Anything from how the user scheduled their delivery appointment on Rivian.com to what they saw on the Rivian mobile app to even the internal tools that the operations team used to fulfill these deliveries.
With this in mind, product managers can look at impacting two major buckets:
(1) The bottom-line
How much revenue their product is generating for the business and thus improving profitability
Example: Facebook (Meta) Product team driving ads.
How much costs their product can reduce and thus improving profitability
Example: Fleet Management Product team at Lyft.
(2) Customer experience
How much do customers love using the product
This may be measured in NPS or in some cases CSAT.
How much do customers use the product on a regular basis
Depending on the product, repeat usage is usually indicative of a useful product.
Now you probably understand why progressive tech companies are using product management to iterate and improve their software suite to ensure they stay relevant in the market and continue to deliver additional value to their customers through software.
Coming soon…
Throughout The Product Management Playbook, I’ll be diving deeper into product management as it relates to the expansive product development process and sharing the knowledge I’ve accumulated over the years as a PM.
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