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
