Idea week introduction

Jesse E. Owens II

Senior Product Manager @ MasterCard

Bio

Senior Product Manager @ MasterCard
Former Co-Founder @ Squīr Technologies
Product Manager @ Imagine Easy Solutions
Application Developer @ J.P. Morgan Chase
BSc. Computer Science @ Norfolk State University

What is a Product Manager?

A product manager investigates, selects, and drives the development of products for an organization.

“To discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”

~Marty Cagan

Essentials of Product Mgt

"Product management can be described as the intersection between business, technology and user experience . A good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with practitioners in all"

~Martin Eriksson

Product Dev Process

Conceptual Product Development

1. Identify Customer Needs

2. Generate Product Concepts

3. Perform Business Justification

4. Selection of a Product Concept

Technical Product Development

1. Detailed Development Plan

2. Sprint Planning

3. Unit/QA/Regression Testing

4. Release Management

Identify Customer Needs

High Level Outline:

Customer needs are determined by interviewing focus groups, observing competitive products in the market and analyzing product and system metrics.

Tasks:

- Conduct customer interviews to gather feedback from the current product stack

- Study your industry to identify trends that could drive new market opportunities

- Create a list of needs or problems experienced from user base

- Identify competitive products that are addressing feedback provided by focus groups, current and potential clients

Image credit: arp-research.co.uk

Generate Product Concepts

High Level Outline:

Based on data collected on customers’ needs and analysis of competitive products, the design and tech teams will come together to draft a wish-list of products to actively pursue.

Tasks:

- Document functional specification(s) of product concept

- Develop wireframe(s) of product concept

- Study the feasibility of product concepts as it pertains to the product roadmap

Perform Business Justification

High Level Outline:

During this stage a thorough analysis of the product and required development necessary to achieve expected benefits is performed to determine the product development direction for the team.

Tasks:

- Develop KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the success of the product

- Review anticipated E (Effort) vs. V (Value) ratio of the product

- Recommend products to build prototypes based on data collected from the economic analysis

Product Concept Selection

High Level Outline:

Designers and engineers develop a number of prototypes that illustrate the type of products that are technically feasible, best meet the requirements of the target customers and create a favorable return on investment.

Tasks:

- Build and test experimental prototype(s)

- Stakeholders evaluate the prototypes and provide product readiness grade to ensure that the team is building the right product or if the idea needs more refining

- Select a product to begin development