intro to product management

Jesse E. Owens II

Senior Product Manager, API & Consumer @ MasterCard

My Journey

• Computer Science Degree from Norfolk State University
• 12 years of B2B and B2C product development experience
• Military Defense, Investment Banking, Education and Payments
• Self taught UX Design, Web & Mobile Development

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 drives the definition, development and shipment of features that deliver business value in partnership with technical and non-technical stakeholders

Visionary + Consumer Advocate + Partner

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, Founder of ProductTank

B2B

"Business to Business" is a  business that is conducted between companies.

B2C

"Business to Consumer" is a business  conducted directly between a company and consumers who are the end-users of its products or services.

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:

• Conduct customer interviews
•  Study your industry
• Identify competitive products
• Collect product metrics

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:

• Craft a narrative of the product feature
• Develop wireframe(s) of product feature
• Assess complexity of product feature

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)
•  E (Effort) vs. V (Value) ratio
•  Build prototype(s) ie. "Proof of Concept"

 

Product feature Selection

Designers and product developers present the prototype of the design to stakeholders to decide whether or not to pursue development of the feature

Tasks:

• Stakeholders review the prototype/design
• Select a feature 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

REsources

• LowerCase Capital: lowercasecapital.com
• Product Hunt: producthunt.com
• Morning Reader: morningreader.com
• Agile Manifesto: agilemanifesto.org

Contact Me

@JesseEOwensII

 

@JesseEOwensII

 

Jesse Owens II

Questions ?