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A PM is responsible for making sure that a team ships a great product.
One reason product management is such an appealing career is you get to sit at the intersection of technology, business, and design. You get to wear many hats and learn multiple points of view.
As a product manager, you’ll be the advocate for the customer. You’ll learn their needs and translate those needs into product goals and features.
VV IMP
All products and features start with research and planning.
This is the time when the PM is starting to think about what to build next. The next idea may come from a customer request, competitive analysis, new technology, user research, the sales or marketing teams, brainstorming, or the big vision for the product.
big part of the product manager’s job in this phase is creating or...
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This means figuring out a cohesive long-term pl...
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This is also the time when the PM starts defining success. He’ll envision what the world looks like if the team is successful. Many companies use the model of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to communicate the most important goals of the team. In this model, the PM works with the team to come up with measurable results that it can commit to.
Use the name of the Model; Objectives and Key Results (OKR)
Product design does not just mean user interface (UI) design or drawing out what the product will look like. Product design is defining the features and functionality of the product.
On some teams, especially shipped software (as opposed to online software) teams at Microsoft, the PM will write out a detailed functional specification (spec) that includes things like: Goals Use Cases Requirements Wireframes Bullet points describing every possible state of the feature Internationalization Security
I need to see example of Functional Specification Document.
PMs who are good at project management and have good communication skills do well working on shipped software. Shipped software can also be great for people who want a good work/life balance, since there aren’t usually urgent issues that need to be fixed within hours.
Most online-software teams run A/B tests (also called multivariate testing or online experiments). In an A/B test, a new feature is released to a percentage of users. The behaviors of the experiment and control group are later compared to see if the new feature improves the experience.
Because companies in online software collect more data, it’s important that these PMs are skilled with data analysis and designing experiments.
Data Analysis and Designing Experiments are important
PMs who like doing customer research and market analysis could enjoy working on B2B products.
Example is Intellect's products for the banks.
These are also the products where
PMs tend to exert the most influence, so they can be a very satis...
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With newer products, such as those about to launch or recently launched, the team is often focused on shipping a minimum viable product (MVP). This is not the time to tackle all challenges, since you don’t even know if the product is a good fit in the market and for customers. Instead, you want to answer questions and prove your core value as quickly as possible.
This is a v imp info since it makes me understand why MVP can only work for early stage products and not matured products.
PMs focus on cutting non-essential features to strip the product down to just the essentials. This allows them to launch faster and to begin the process of learning what customers really want (or if they want the product at all). Sometimes, this means launching products that aren’t as polished as you would like.
For mature products, such as market leaders, most of the work will be iterating on the product and trying to improve it. PMs often have feedback from previous versions as to which areas need the most improvement and can focus on them.
Intellect products are like this. Intellect's products are B2B but matured.
As a PM on a mature product, it can be very important to make sure you don’t get stuck making small incremental improvements.
While most roles on the team are crisply defined, product managers have a more fluid role. When you’re a product manager, your job is anything that isn’t being covered by other people.
Microsoft originated the PM role in the 1980s when they realized that they needed someone between the marketing and engineering teams who focused on making the product usable for customers.
During development, the product manager iterates through product reviews. There’s not much project management overhead, but PMs can watch the logs to see new code as soon as the engineers check it in. When everything is ready, the PM coordinates a rollout plan and works with marketing for the launch.
Product managers are the product owners. They focus on the vision of a product.
When a PM comes up with an idea, he puts together a business case in a memo, also called a narrative. This document will cover the details of the recommendation and analysis that supports it, especially including numbers about the impact and rationale. Amazon focuses on documents instead of presentations for new proposals because documents force the author to be precise and show clear thinking.
Very interesting. VV IMP.
Many teams follow an Agile process, where the PM is the product owner and is responsible for writing user stories and the team’s backlog.
When products are ready for launch, the PM works with the marketing team and prepares for a hand off to the Operations team that will run the program on an ongoing basis.
Product managers usually work on customer-facing teams. Technical program managers usually work on platform or infrastructure initiatives, often across multiple teams.
The PM role includes more product design, while the TPM role involves more project management.
Note the diff b/w PM and TPM
The company runs many A/B tests and is data driven.
Check again what is A/B test
startups have fewer resources, so there’s more “white space” for the PMs to fill in and more of a need to be really scrappy.
creating new features vs. polishing existing features vs. improving internal efficiencies.
PM's job not only requires creating new features, it also includes POLISHING existing ones and to also improve INTERNAL EFFICIENCIES.
When you’re 30 people, individual OKRs [Objectives and Key Results] are superfluous; everyone’s would just read ‘Do whatever I can to help the company survive and grow.’
OKR. Remember the terminology.
One of my favorite experiences was working to launch a new security feature (two-step verification) one week after joining the company. We assembled a great team and went from idea to designs to launch in five weeks across all of our desktop and mobile apps, our website, and our developer APIs. It was really gratifying to see how much a small team could do really quickly.
I also need to prepare a list of such examples where I worked on a product feature. It could be creating a feature or enhancing it. May be prepare examples of both. Framework would be: How to go from Idea > Design > Launch.
Also, some knowledge of APIs would come handy.
Airbnb is a community marketplace
Is marketplace something where both buyers and sellers engage.
If you ask interviewers what they’re looking for in PM candidates, they’ll usually say that they are looking for smart people who get stuff done.
PM is a smart person that gets stuff done.
The requirements list will be more detailed, but it will ultimately boil down to two criteria: Can you be trusted to make the right decisions? Can you push through all of the potential roadblocks to deliver a great product?
I need to focus on citing examples around these. Like, did I face any roadblock while developing any feature, etc. Think about it.
see your projects through to the end.
Say, I see the project through to the end. (it says that even though it may not come under my responsibility area but I want to make sure that I take full ownership).
Understand not only if your outcome was successful, but by what metrics it was successful—or not.
IMP point
Consider what it is that drove the success or lack of success. It’s okay to fail sometimes, but you need to know why you failed.
Noted.
excellent customer focus and product design skills.
A good PM has these two imp skills.
Econ is also a great field for picking up analytical skills and proficiency with statistics.
Ok. So I can leverage this to back the claim that I have good analytical skills.
Other fields like psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, human-computer interaction (HCI), or sociology can also be very relevant for product management.
I can say I have interest in such fields. Name one relevant field and back it up with name of a book that read. May be "Sapiens".
Arjun, who got an MBA after starting as a PM at Microsoft, decided to go to business school when he noticed that well-designed products didn’t always become market winners.
Take the chance to start something. Gain experience by launching projects, joining clubs, or building something. This will help you avoid the biggest MBA pitfall: being someone who only wants to tell people what to do, and doesn’t know how to actually do things.
I need to prepare some examples where I started something. VV IMP.
Launch! The most important way a product manager is judged is by the products she’s launched. If your team is close to launch but not quite there, you might want to wait until the product is fully launched to start applying. Likewise, if you’re on a team with a very long ship cycle, you might consider switching to a team with more frequent launches so you can get the experience of seeing a product through the entire cycle.
I can talk about INTRA DAY LIQUIDITY module. I can say that I was the PM for that. Or may be I was involved with the team creating that Module.
Take on responsibilities to round out your skills. If you’ve always been really strong in product design, see if you can learn data analysis. If you’ve been working on deep technical problems, see if you can spend some time doing user research.
It’s your job to cut through the ambiguity to help the team get moving.
Analytical skills come into product management in two major ways: analyzing what your team should be doing and analyzing how to persuade people to do that thing. As a PM, you need to become comfortable with finding data that convinces people. That data is sometimes from product metrics, sometimes from user research, and sometimes from competitive analysis.
see the diff. I thought otherwise.
