How to Influence Stakeholders and Meet Product Goals

Jesse E. Owens II

Senior Product Manager, API & Consumer @ MasterCard

My product

MasterPass is an omni-channel digital payment platform that allows consumers consumers to transact via in- store, online or mobile app

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 Management

© 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 Features

3. Perform Business Justification

4. Selection of a Product Feature

Technical Product Development

1. Detailed Development Plan

2. Sprint Planning

3. Unit/QA/Regression Testing

4. Release Management

Identify Customer Needs

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

Tasks:

- Create a list of needs from current product stack

 - Conduct customer interviews

- Study your industry

- Identify competitive products

Image credit: arp-research.co.uk

Generate Product features

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

Tasks:

- Document functional specification(s) of product concept

- Develop wireframe(s) of product concept (if applicable)

- Understand the technical  feasibility of product concepts as it pertains to the product roadmap

Perform Business Justification

During this stage a thorough analysis of the feature 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)

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

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

Product feature Selection

Designers and product developers craft  a draft design of the feature(s)  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 review the prototype/design

- Select a product to begin development

Image credit: Robert Scoble/Flickr

the stakeholders

• Senior Tech Leadership
• Senior Business Leadership
• Commericalization 
• Legal
• Information Security
• UX

Key tenants of great communication

• Be Honest
• Be Transparent
• Be Empathic

tools to ensure business & TEch alignment

• Quarterly Roadmap
  • What are the list of features we plan to deliver during the quarter?
• Business Value
  • For each feature, what's the value to the business upon delivery ?
• Delivery  Time
  • When will this feature be in the hands of users?
• Risks & Dependencies
  • what are the roadblocks that would prevent the dev team's ability to deliver on the quarterly roadmap?

One thing to Avoid

Contact Me

@JesseEOwensII

@JesseEOwensII

Jesse Owens II

Questions ?