PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Product management started out as brand management.

My go to description of Product Management is Josh Elman’s: “A

product manager helps their team (and company) ship the right product
to their users.” I love this description, and I think it’s the best one for
explaining the job responsibility.

Another popular framework is that a PM sits between UX, Tech, and

Business.

A Founder also does the same. Then, whats the difference between a
Founder’s role and a Product Manager’s role ?

When there is no longer enough time from the founder, as he gets busy
with funding and other issues and things have stopped feeling cohesive.
Teams ask:

Business - “how do we evaluate which opportunities propel the business

forward?” 


Design - “how do we think about our users?” 


Engineering - “how do we build things?” 


The PM the builds the system and tools that help the entire team build
the product.

Product Manager role is often confused with two other roles: the
Project Manager and the Program Manager (also PMs !!)
Product Manager
Product Managers own the success of a product throughout its
whole lifecycle.
Project Manager
Project Managers are responsible for execution. They live in the
world of budgets and schedules. This role is most valuable in large
companies, or with projects that include a lot of dependencies.
Program Manager
Program Manager role is nearly always technical and relates to
programming. You can often think of them as technical Product
Managers.
Current Education for Product Management 


Since there's no standard way to become a product manager, people

take a variety of approaches.
1. Going to engineering school and then entering straight into a
product-management role and learning on the job.

2. Working in an adjacent nontechnical role such as marketing, account
management, or customer service and transition into product
management as a way of getting closer to the product.
3. Going to an MBA program. In fact, as product management becomes
a more desired career for MBAs, MBA programs are creating new
classes.
 One of the best is Tom Eisenmann's PM101 class at Harvard
Business School which focuses on relevant 
content for both
consumer goods and software product management
 Recently, programs such as Startup Institute and General
Assembly are offering a more targeted education for people trying
to move into product management. Startup Institute is a full-time
eight-week program and touches on product management.
 General Assembly is another emerging program for product
management education. Its business fundamentals curriculum
includes a 10-week, four-hour-per-week product management
course. Rather than focusing on engineering, design, and product
management, it focuses more on the skills a product manager will
frequently need, such as creating and prioritizing a features list,
creating wireframes, and making a roadmap.
UX UI
At the most basic level, the User Interface (UI) is the series of screens,
pages, and visual elements—like buttons and icons—that enable a
person to interact with a product or service.

User eXperience (UX), on the other hand, is the internal experience that
a person has as they interact with every aspect of a product or service.

What is UX?

User experience, or UX, evolved as a result of the improvements to UI.

Once there was something for users to interact with, their experience,
whether positive, negative, or neutral, changed how users felt about
those interactions.

Source: Peter Moreville

This ‘usability honeycomb’ has become the foundation for best practices
for UX professionals to help guide their efforts across multiple
touchpoints with the user, including:

 How they would discover your company’s product

 The sequence of actions they take as they interact with the
interface
 The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish
their task
 The impressions they take away from the interaction as a whole
TECH STACK
To develop a web application, you need to select the server, database,
programming language, framework, and frontend tools that you’re going
to use. These web development technologies built on top of each other
are collectively called a stack.

Anatomy of a Tech Stack

Tech stack comes with two software components, — Frontend and

Backend (also known as client side and server side). Now let’s get a
deeper into the anatomy of a tech stack.

Client-side (Front end)

Client-side web development involves everything users see on their
screens. Here are the major frontend technology stack components:

 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets

(CSS). HTML tells a browser how to display the content of web
pages, while CSS styles that content.
 JavaScript (JS). JS makes web pages interactive.
Server-Side (Backend)

The server side isn’t visible to users, but it powers the client side.
It is represented by information, servers, and databases that are
located somewhere else.

As for server-side programming languages, they are used to create the

logic of websites and applications. Frameworks for programming
languages offer lots of tools for simpler and faster coding.

Some of the popular programming languages and their major

frameworks (in parentheses):

 Ruby (Ruby on Rails)

 Python (Django, Flask, Pylons)
 PHP (Laravel)
 Java (Spring)
 Scala (Play)
 [Link], a JavaScript runtime, is also used for backend
programming.

Your web application needs a place to store its data, and that’s what
a database is used for.

- MySQL : you can use SQL queries to find information in the MySQL
database
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB : user's behavioral data

Others :

Cloud Based Infrastruture - Amazon web services like EC2, RDS, S3, ELB,
Autoscaling, CodeDeploy, SES

Caching and Delivery - AWS CloudFront and Elasticache(based on

memcache)

Python - Used for some backend tasks

Application layer consists of code or programming that does

calculations to the data from the front end or the back end and it sends
it to the right place
What are wireframes ?

In order to build a great product, you first have to conceptualize it. One
of the crucial skills for conceptualizing your idea is Wireframing

1. Wireframes are visual guides for websites or apps that lay out the
rough structure for where the content is going to go.
2. Wireframing is the first step to take in order to materialize your idea
3. Wireframes have a low fidelity/accuracy. As you gather feedback, you
add more details and more fidelity
4. Wireframes make it easier to communicate feature ideas

If you're on a smaller team, you will probably have to work on

wireframes yourself

In a larger company, you might not be asked to do wireframes, but you

need to be familiar with them or contribute to their creation.

These skills are also helpful if you want to sketch out an idea you want to
propose

Tools:
 Balsamiq, Axure, Omnigraffle, Hotgloo, POP

 The wireframe on your left is on Balsamiq

AGILE
Agile is a way of applying the lean mindset to software development

MVP = Minimum Viable Product

The term "MVP" was first introduced in "The lean startup framework" by
Eric Ries

"A Minimum Viable Product 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"

In an MVP experiment, you build the smallest version of a product, with

the least amount of resources, in order to get real feedback and find out
if your idea will work

Validated learning is learning from a scientific experiment where you are

not biasing your customers

Fail fast: run as many experiments as you can in order to collect more
data and find the best version for your product
METRICS
#1 Growth & Activation metrics
 Track and measure how your product is growing : Total New Users,
New users by source, Activated users (performed an In App
action)
 MAU (Monthly Active Users), WAU, DAU, DAU / MAU
 Downloads, App Opens
 Mobile %, Android vs iOS

#2 Retention metrics
 App User Retention % : 7 days, 30 days
 Uninstall %
 Track how many people are coming back to use your App
repeatedly : Retained users, Resurrected users
 Retained users are users who are using your app all the time
 Resurrected users are users who haven't been using your app
for a while, but they're coming back after you notified them
about, let's say, some attractive new feature

# 3 Engagement Metrics :
 Track how many times users are engaging with the App : Page
Views, PVs per session, PVs per MAU, Visits
 Bounce Rate

#4 User happiness metrics

 Net Promoter Scores (NPS), No of Customers Complaints,
 App Store rating

#5 Revenue metrics
 Lifetime value
 Cost Per Acquisition
 Revenue per user
 Paid user : Organic User ratio
Examples of metrics of popular companies
Companies have a lot of similar metrics, but when it comes to
enagagement, they have some metrics that are specific to their product

Twitter

Growth metrics: total new users per month, DAU/MAU, activated users
Engagement metrics: multiple logins per day, time spent on the website,
number of tweets sent per user, average number of likes, re-tweets and
follows, number of private messages sent

Youtube

Growth metrics: DAU/MAU, total new users, activated users

Engagement metrics: views per user, average viewing time per user

Facebook :

Growth metrics: New users, DAU / MAU

Engagement metrics: newsfeed position clicks, number of messages
sent, time spent on the website, moved to their partner websites,
average number of likes users give and get