My Notes of Become a Product Manager Course
by Cole Mercer and Evan Kimbrell
Hello! :) In this article, I will share with you my notes from the most comprehensive product management training I have ever received. For information about the course, click here.
Product Management is not something study at school.
Once you get some customers and it running, the startup is now a product and you have to manage it. You need to have a basic understanding of Product Management, if you want to be succesful as an entreprenuer.
What is a Product Manager?
Infect a rol and product manager responsibilities changes different industries, different companies.
Basicly, product managers who someone responsible product been succesful or not. The PM, communications hub, a prioritizier, a researcher, a presenter, the most importantly they’re responsible for the ultimate success of product.
- Product Managers are not a manager of anybody. Nobody reports you, nobody is boss and you can’t fire anyone. This is necessaery for the need maximum collabaration.
- Product Manager are an enabler.
- Product Manager, they allow designers, developers, executives to do the is job better by taking away the tasks that would traditionally distract them from their expertise
Internal tools PM: The rol, builds tools for other people inside the company
Business to Business or SaaS PM: the clients are other companies, the PM interacts with the sales people pf the company
Business to Consumer PM: The most common, the client is the average consumer, it requires a lot of vision and creativity, the PM has to get feedback from users and analyze the data in order to adapt the product
Every product ever stems from a need and an idea.
Product vs. Project Management
Product Managers, need to skill of Project Management. Because; on the front end, collection requirements and ideas, the finding potancial initiative.
Product managers are responsible for the succcess of a product. Success is defined by KPI or metrics.
A project manager is responsible for accomplishing a project, not a goal.
A project usually has a timeline and budget as a constraint.
Ideas and User Needs
You can generally find needs and ideas from four main places: Employees, Metrics, Users, Clients.
Ideas can come from anywhere, and you should appreciate ideas and feedback from everybody. The primary job of a product manager is to find out which ideas are best, why they are the best, and when to act upon them — not to only come up with the ideas themselves.
Users vs. Customers
A customer could be someone that signs the check to purchase a product but never uses it, or they could be the users themselves. When you purchase a Netflix subscription to watch movies, you are both the user and the customer. But when a tech support professional purchases a new email service for their company, there are many other employees that were not responsible for making the decision or paying, so they would only be considered users.
A Few Concepts About Designing and Running Experiments
MVP (Minimum Viable Product): This is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Mockups: Static displays of what the final product looks like
Prototypes: It allows you to see potential problems in the user flow and has high fidelity and basic interaction.
Requirement: Requests that business analysts collect from stakeholders to inform the development team.
API (Application Programming Interface): A software agent that allows two applications to communicate with each other. There are two types, SOAP API and Rest API.
What is Agile? Scrum, Kanban
Hello! I continue with the second part of my article “How to become a product manager course notes”. In this article, I will talk about Agile, one of the project management methods.
Product Lifecycle
Introduction, growth, maturity, decline.
During maturity phases do competitors typically en masse start to enter the market.
Product Development Process
Conceive: At this stage, we collect user problems and brainstorm solutions.
Plan: Market research on the ideas we got in phase conceive and create a roadmap with customer interviews.
Develop: Make timelines and write our features, user stories, specs, estimations on very specific details.
Iterate: We finished MVP or the early prototype, we test the assumptions.
Launch: Position the product for public launch to see what reaction we get
Steady state: Collecting metrics and optimizing them
Maintain or kill: Analyzing the data to what is the return on investment and making a decision.
What is Lean Product Development?
The lean framework is a product development philosophy that revolves around cutting all of the unnecessary work or effort until.
What is Agile?
Agile is a way of applying the lean mindset to software development.
Agile Manifesto
- individuals and interactions over processes and tools;
- working software over comprehensive documentation;
- customer collaboration over contract negotiation;
- responding to change over following a plan. For more information
What is Scrum and How Does it Work?
The sprint planning meeting: You talk about what needs to be done in order to implement it. You take the most important features from the top of your product backlog and you move it to the sprint backlog.
The start of the developing process: Asprint usually takes 2 weeks. Tasks in the Sprint backlog are moved to “In Progress” and then to “Done”.
Sprint Review: It is the meeting where the Product Owner responsible for the Product Backlog monitors the progress of the project by checking the completed and unfinished works.
Standup meetings(Daily): In the morning “What did you do yesterday”, “What will you do today”, “What are the obstacles in front of you?” 15-minute meetings where questions are answered.
What is not Daily Scrum?
- It’s not a problem-solving meeting.
- It is not a meeting where you can check who is doing the work or not.
Retrospective meetings: At the end of each sprint, talk to your team about what went well and what didn’t.
Roles in Scrum
What does the Product Owner? What can’t Product Owner do?
The Product Owner is the person responsible for the profitability of the product (ROI), who clarifies the business, defines the product features by prioritizing the business, and represents all business stakeholders to the team.
- PO is not the manager of the development Team.
- The PO cannot assign jobs or tasks to development Team members.
- The PO cannot interfere with how the development Team does the work.
- The PO cannot request a status report from the development Team.
- PO cannot participate in daily scrums except as a spectator.
Product Manager vs. Product Owner
- Product Manager; Potential customers arrange the Roadmap by meeting with the design and development teams. The Product Owner checks whether the prepared Roadmap is progressing correctly.
- Both need to know the product and general operation
- PM decides product vision. The PO makes sure that the backlog is clear and that things are progressing in the correct order.
- PM is strategy and data driven. PO is more tactically oriented.
The Scrum Master: Scrum Masters give importance to value-based priority enough to guide the Product Owner regarding effective product backlog management, have enough knowledge of Scrum basics to support Release Planning, and have enough knowledge to make everyone in their team functional and productive, as well as to support team members individually. They are the leaders who constantly improve themselves, who protect the team with the highest level from external interference.
Scrum Team
- It usually consists of 5–10 people.
- It is cross-functional, that is, people in different tasks such as QA, developer, UI designer work together.
- Teams organize themselves.
What is Kanban and How Does it Work?
A Kanban board has columns with cards thar you can move from one column to another, yo reflect the state of the item: “To do”, “In progress”, or “Done”. Kanban doesn’t use sprints, only the product backlog itself and they take the next task off the top of the product backlog.
What is Waterfall Development?
The waterfall framework is the opposite of Agile and way is riskier. In the Waterfall framework, we take all the features of a product and develop them all at the same time.
You can read this blog posts about product management and follow this product managers
Shreyas Doshi — Good Product Managers, Great Product Managers
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see you :)
