Product
Management
Excerpts
Sandeep chadda
& IIMA PGPX 2019-20 batch
Product Manager
Learning 1 - One of the major struggles of PMs during
interviews and work in general is confirmation bias. An
example I always take is that if I ask a candidate to create a
cab hailing app one would create 80% of the features
matching Uber. Also, the questions the candidate may ask are
justifying the features of Uber. This results in sub optimal
products or products often play catch up with compete. The
first thing to know is that all of us are subject to confirmation
bias and fall in love with our thoughts or research. The same
problem is with start ups when they fall in love with their
product and selectively filter out information or signals telling
Product the product may fail.
management Learning 2: Competition is very important during product
management. I use compete in 3 ways:1. Look at compete to
shorten your learning curve. See features they have shipped
to understand the problems they have solved.2. Also look at
their feedback/ user voice channel to understand what is the
community talking about the product/ features. 3. Look at the
complete release notes to understand their investment areas.
Maybe you are entering a segment looking at compete that
the competition stopped investing in 2 years back. The intent
of all 3 is to shorten our learning curve while creating our
products but at no time are we in the business of creating a
duplicate feature.
2
Product Manager
Learning 3: Experimentation. We don't build features. We run
experiments with the intent to fail fast. Here the intent is to
identify a measurable goal that we want to go after. The
measurable goal should prove or disprove our hypothesis with
the focus on learning. And then you build the product. As
soon as the hypothesis is validated or invalidated, we need to
pivot to another experiment or persevere to build it into a
fully fledged feature. Fail fast and experimentation mindset is
the key here.
Product
management
Learning 4: Growth mindset - Whenever we enter a
conversation or a transaction then the intent is always to
learn. Once the mindset is to learn, then it is not to prove a
point. Or tell folks how well researched is your spec. Also
when we get into a conversation with a customers the intent
is to learn the pain rather than blurting out possible solutions.
Product Management is 80% understanding the problem and
20% creating solutions. Therefore the that takes care of the
confirmation bias that I talked earlier to a large extent
3
Product Manager
Learning 5: Funnels : a funnel represents how a user interacts
with your product from the entry till exit. E.g. on Amazon if
100 users open the home page, 50 use search, 25 click on an
item, 10 add an item in the basket and 2 actually make the
purchase. Data and telemetry helps us analyze why the drops
are happening and how can you make the conversion ratio
better.
Product
management Learning 6: There are various forms for customer
interactions:1. Online forums: feedback etc. Product manager
does this2. Research: we also have researchers who appoint
customers or prospective customers for research and usability
study .A product manager often does user research on a
sample set of users
4
Product Manager
Learning 7: Planning : Planning has many facets. you can use a
plan to create a backlog, to ensure you stay on target, to
reach your final objective, and even to motivate your team. At
Microsoft they follow the OKR model to do all this.
Product
management
Learning 8: You would often here that PMs are catch all for
everything. They are UX designers, strategists, architects,
writers, marketing, evangelists. This results in a weird
problem when PMs begin to think that they ought to do
everything. The worst is when PMs start developing code .As a
PM you should do what only you can do. The same is true
whole creating products as well. As a PM are you a feature
vending machine or are you an enabler who let's the
community create for you.
5
Product Manager
Learning 9: MVP and experimentation - some of the best
Product guys get in the trap of perfecting their product. It is
not uncommon for PMs to be debating on bugs that users
would never got in their workflows. Then how do we find the
minimum viable product that can be shipped and understand
whether the feature (set) is valuable to our users
Product
management
Learning 10: As product managers you are leaders. Even in
corporate decisions you are always consulted and informed.
6
Tips and Knowhow in Product management
what is REST API and JSON at a high level to understand the
1 flow of information between a client and server.
MS when we create apps, we always expose REST APIs for
2 other consumers to extend the products. Also, REST is a great
low cost way of experimentation since we don't need to
invest in UI
GraphQL is about making optimized queries .. popularized by
3 Facebook followed by all leading product companies now
Product manager has various progressions. One may join as a
4 junior program manager...become a senior. Then a
principal...and then a partner or a CVP (corporate VP)
Experiments are allowed to breed even if they are conflicting with other products.
5 E.g. Kaizala is a great example. It is an experiment that became a big product and it
was allowed to breed and get its own market share. Now that it is a big enough
product that needs attention, it is being merged into Office since it makes most
sense to be with office. Think it like this. It is a start up that grew and now since it is
aligned to one of our bigger product offerings, it will be acquired and merged. At
times, products don't find alignment with our mainstream product offering
therefore they stay unmerged and untouched. E.g. LinkedIn, GitHub
Tips and Knowhow in Product management
MVP I reckon is a function of our product's core value
proposition and our customer's expectations from us.
Choosing what to ship in MVP should be like empathy. you
1 don't just listen to your consumers requests but also actually
understand the environment in which they'll be using your
product to decide the core features...and be mindful during
the development process that non-core features aren't
holding your MVP back.
2 Listen to: Why You'll Never Quit Amazon Prime -
https://one.npr.org/i/744828756:744828758
MVP is a very potent tool to build champions of the product
3 among our consumers very early in the product lifecycle. If
our MVP disappoints them, or has fewer features than what
they had expected, then we risk losing a few potential
champions.
ROLES :Product manager has various progressions. One may
4 join as a junior program manager...become a senior. Then a
principal and then a partner or a CVP (corporate VP)
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. you write down an objective (vision)
5 and measurable key results that you want to go after in a quarter or a Sprint
Objective could be: Bing should be the most preferred search in enterprises. KR
could be:1. TOP 100 enterprises in Microsoft should be able to get 80% of their
business workflows accomplished using Bing by the end of Q2
THANK
YOU
