Intro to Product Management

Understanding Users to Drive Adoption for Your Product

Jesse E. Owens II

Senior Product Manager @ MasterCard

Bio

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

Workshop Outline

• Fundamentals of Product Management (15 min)
• Craft User Personas (15 min)
• Prototype New Discover Feature (30 min)
• Presentation of Redesign (15 min)
• Q & A (15 min)

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

© 2011 Martin Eriksson. 

"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

Image credit: Robert Scoble/Flickr

User Personas

• User Personas are communication tools used to define and understand a target user base for your product 
• Drive product development efforts to focus on your key users rather than building for the whole world

Questions that you need answers to are the following:

‣Who are our users?  ‣What are their habits? ‣When are they visiting?

‣Where are they accessing? ‣Why are they coming to us? ‣How are they accessing?

Data for User Persona

- Surveys

- Focus Groups

- User Tests

- Web/System Analytics

Once you have all of your data, it’s time to analyze and extract common trends / themes that will lead to key drivers for the development of your product.

How to Craft a User Persona

- Visualize your ideal customer that aligns to the data collected, not your imagination

- Biographical information (name, age, gender, location, income, etc)

- Highlight the Goals / Wants / Frustrations of your target customer

- Produce a shareable summary

Examples of User Personas

- Barber Persona for Grooming  App: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-sJCF89yN6SRMjZntajSRRcWKdQR3xCLhE38F7SlUYg/edit

- Customer Persona for Grooming App:

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fIIPya5FP08UGMPPduVnO8_Hvkl0C--paTk5o9P8OEE/edit

Create Your Persona

- Go to Music Discovery Results

- You’re creating a set of personas for Spotify's discover feature redesign

- Using the data from the user survey, try to extract trends and develop 2-3 personas

- Be ready to share!

Spotify Discover Feature

Key Points to Consider

• Recommend music is based on likes, follows and recent music listening history
• Each recommendation allows the user to follow or listen to the artist directly
• The Discover feature is located differently between the desktop and mobile experience
• Most of the recommended artist are musicians that are exist in playlist which defeats the concept of music discovery
• The sorting of the recommendations aren't clear in terms of the relevance

Create Spotify Discover Feature

• Incorporate feedback from survey and current discover feature functionality
• Wireframe the new feature using Balasmiq
• Create a clickable prototype using Invision 
• Be ready to share!

Contact Me

  @JesseEOwensII

https://techintuitions.tumblr.com/  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseowensii

Questions ?