MBA-IB 2021-23

PRE-READ
MATERIAL
PRODUCT
MANAGEMENT

Compiled by
Prep Comm, IIFT
INDEX

Sr. Topic Pg. No.

1 What is a Product? 1

2 What is Product Management? 1

3 What isn’t Product Management? 1

4 What Does Effective Product Management Look Like? 2

5 How to create a Product Strategy? 3

6 What frameworks are commonly used? 3

7 An Important Concept in Product Design: Wireframing 4

8 Important KPIs and Metrics for Product Management 5

9 How to approach Product Management Case Studies? 7

10 References 8
Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

1. What is a Product?
1. Anything that solves the customer’s need/want
2. Digital/Physical

The next question, “What is product management?” comes up pretty often, even from
experienced business people. One reason is that product management encompasses a wide-
ranging area of responsibilities. Indeed, the role itself means very different things in different
organizations. Here is the most concise response we’ve come up with for the “What is product
management?” question: Product management is the practice of strategically driving the
development, market launch, and continual support and improvement of a company’s products.

2. What is Product Management?

The day-to-day tasks include a wide variety of strategic and tactical duties. Most product
managers or product owners do not take on all these responsibilities. In most companies, at
least some of them are owned by other teams or departments. But most product professionals
spend the majority of their time focused on the following:

• Conducting Research: Researching to gain expertise about the company’s market, user
personas, and competitors.
• Developing Strategy: Shaping the industry knowledge they’ve learned into a high-level
strategic plan for their product—including goals and objectives, a broad-strokes
overview of the product itself, and maybe a rough timeline.
• Communicating Plans: Developing a working strategic plan using a product roadmap
and presenting it to key stakeholders across their organization: executives, investors,
their development team, etc. Ongoing communication across their cross-functional
teams throughout the development process and beyond.
• Coordinating Development: Assuming they have received a green light to move
forward with their product’s strategic plan, coordinating with the relevant teams—
product marketing, development, etc.—to begin executing the plan.
• Acting on Feedback and Data Analysis: Finally, after building, testing, and introducing
the product to the marketplace, learning via data analysis and soliciting direct feedback
from users, what works, what doesn’t, and what to add. Working with the relevant
teams to incorporate this feedback into future iterations of the product.

3. What isn't Product Management?

Product managers owning the day-to-day details of a product’s development is a common
misconception. This is the role of a project manager.

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

P r o d u c t M a n a g e r v s. P r o j e c t M a n a g e r
Key Functions

Product Manager Project Manager

• Researching • Breaking down initiatives

• Setting product vision into tasks
• Communicating vision to • Planning project timelines
stakeholders • Allocating project resources
• Developing strategic plan • Monitoring task completion
• Creating and maintaining • Communicating progress to
product roadmap stakeholders.

Product management is a strategic function. Tasking product managers with determining a

product’s overall reason for being— the product’s “Why?”

They’re also responsible for communicating product objectives and plans for the rest of the
company. They must ensure everyone is working toward a shared organizational goal.

Product management encompasses a broad set of ongoing strategic responsibilities. They

shouldn’t be responsible for the ground-level details of the development process.

Smart organizations separate this function and assign tactical elements to project managers,
such as scheduling and managing workloads. This distinct division leaves the product manager
free to focus on the higher-level strategy.

4. What Does Effective Product Management Look Like?

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

5. How to create a Product Strategy?

Steps involved in creation of a product strategy can be categorized into following phases:

6. What frameworks are commonly used?

The CIRCLES method is a problem-solving framework that helps product managers (PMs)
make a thorough and thoughtful response to any design question.

C – Comprehend the situation

I – Identify the customer’s needs
R – Report the customer’s needs
C – Cut, through prioritization
L – List Solutions
E – Evaluate Trade-offs
S – Summarize your recommendation

To move through the above steps, ask clarifying questions:

a. What is the organizational goal – customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and
monetization?
b. Who are my user personas?
c. What are users’ needs/wants?
d. Which user problems to solve?
e. What are the product ideas/solutions?
f. How will we prioritize the ideas? What is Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
g. How do you define success and how do you plan to measure it? (KPIs/metrics)
h. How will we iterate?

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

Usually, we use STAR framework to answer these questions: -

S T A R
SITUATION TASK ACTION RESULTS

What was the situation What tasks were What actions did you What were the results
you/ your previous involved in that take? of those actions?
employer faced? situation?

7. An Important Concept in Product Design: Wireframing

Wireframing is a way to design a website service at the structural level. A wireframe is

commonly used to lay out content and functionality on a page that considers user needs and
user journeys.
• Wireframes can be simply hand-drawn, but are often put together using software like
Microsoft’s Visio, to provide an on-screen delivery.
• One of the significant advantages of wireframing is that it provides an early visual that
can be used to review with the client. Users can also review it as an early feedback
mechanism for prototype usability tests. Not only are wireframes easier to amend than
concept designs, once approved by the client and the users they provide confidence to
the designer.

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

8. Important KPIs and Metrics for Product Management

Metrics is a quantifiable measure that allow businesses to define and track the success of a
product or a business activity. Metrics are used by stakeholders, marketers, and the product
management team to detect problems, set goals, and make informed decisions.

Choosing a few key metrics to keep an eye on, spend less time tracking, and more time acting
upon the found data forms the basis of tracking and improving a products success.
Below are a few important KPIs and metrics for Product management:
a. To analyse user engagement

• Daily Active User (DAU) – the number of active users per day. An “active user” is one
who signed in an account and performed some valuable activities.

• Monthly Active User (MAU) – the number of active users who complete valuable
activities per month.

• Session duration: This KPI is the easiest way to track digital product usage. The best way
to measure it is to take the total time users spend in your product, divide it by a number
of users, and take the mean value.

• Traffic (paid/organic): This KPI mostly applies to websites, while for applications and
software we use the number of users. It shows the general number of people who found
and visited the website. While organic traffic is related to the number of visitors who
found a webpage via search, paid traffic counts those who visited it from paid sources,
for example, paid search, social media ads, or sponsored content.

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

• Bounce rate: Another metric is the bounce rate. It allows for measuring the percentage
of users who visited only one page of a website or app and left.

b. To analyse business success

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): These metrics measure a product’s total revenue in
one month. To calculate them, consider the MRR at the beginning of the month, add
gained revenue from new subscriptions, and subtract churned revenue from lost
customers.

• Average revenue per user (ARPU) allows you to count the revenue generated per user
monthly or annually.

Monthly recurring revenue / total number of accounts = ARPU

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or LTV): These metrics allow you to calculate how much
money a user will generate in the long term. LTV displays an average profit from one
user before they cancel a subscription. The point of this KPI is to show you how much
you can spend to attract a new customer at an early stage, regarding the probable profit
from one person. To calculate it, establish an average duration of a customer lifetime
(how long a customer uses a product before stopping) and average revenue per user.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) * Average customer lifetime = CLTV

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric covers all the costs spent on attracting
customers: marketing spending, sales team work and advertising. Sometimes these
costs include salaries of marketing and sales professionals.

(Sales & marketing spending for a period of time / total # of customers generated for a
period of time) = CAC

c. To gauge interest

• Retention rate: Customer retention rate (CRR) is the percentage of customers who
stayed with the company after a certain time period. You can base your calculations on
a number of downloads or first logins to the app.

• Churn rate: While retention rate measures the percentage of users who stayed, the
churn rate measures those you’ve lost. There are two types of churn rate: customer
churn (number of users who canceled paid subscriptions) and revenue churn (amount
of revenue lost due to customer churn). To measure customer churn rate, take the

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

number of customers lost during a certain time period and divide it by the number of
customers at the beginning of this time period.

d. To measure product feature popularity

• Number of sessions per user: This metric helps understand key user behavior: how
often users come back and use the site.

• Number of user actions per session: This KPI tracks not just how many times a user
opened an app. It displays which actions a user made and which feature(s) they used
while using the app. This metric is used to understand the popularity of a certain feature
since it was introduced and compared to a particular period of time. Also, you can
compare these metrics of churned and retained customers and get an idea of what
makes the users interested in your product.

e. To evaluate user satisfaction

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric measures the number of loyal customers who
are likely to recommend a product (promoters), and those customers who hate it
(detractors). To calculate NPS, ask users to rank your product from 0 to 10. Detractors
would give it from 0 to 6 points, users with 7-8 points are neutrals, and those who gave
it 9-10 are promoters. The NPS formula is:

NPS = % of promoters – % of detractors

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It measures the overall level of content or

discontent of a user about a specific product or service feature. Unlike NPS, CSAT is
directed towards evaluating satisfaction with a particular feature.

9. How to approach Product Management Case Studies?

Example: Netflix wants to introduce a “recommendation from friends” section. How would you
design this? What approach would you follow?

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

10. References
Books:

a. Cracking the PM interview

b. Decode and Conquer
c. 143 PM interview questions
d. Product Management Case Study Approach

Mock Interview:

a. Exponent
b. Product School
c. Slack communities – PM School, Lewis Lin

Websites:

a. https://medium.com/
b. https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/product-manager/google-product-manager-interview
c. https://the-ken.com/
d. https://stratechery.com/

Technical Architecture:

a. Introduction to PM - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntzB9pGsD3E&t=294s
b. List of questions by Product school - https://productschool.com/blog/product-management-
2/the-ultimate-list-product-manager-interview-questions/
c. Stellarpeers

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Indian Institute of Foreign Trade Pre-Read Material – Product Management Prep Comm, IIFT

SYSTEMIX: The Systems Consulting, E-Commerce and SMAC Club, IIFT

"Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don't think
anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other." – Bill Gates.

• The Systemix Club at IIFT aims at providing a platform for the students to make a career
in Product Management, Technology Consulting, Digital Business Transformations and
to learn about other applications of technology in different facets of management.
• It provides a stage where young managers can gain insight into the latest technology in
IT field and is particularly involved in imparting the knowledge about gamut of the most
sustainable technologies to come up in recent times in IT – SMAC (Social, Mobile,
Analytics and Cloud).

• We serve as the go-to source for all technical consultation and clearing of doubts with
respect to it. We help the institute to be one step ahead and in par with the world when
it comes to technology and disruptions.

Vision and Mission

We are a community of students who are passionate about the technology industry. Our club
is a platform to learn about the emerging technologies shaping our world, connect with
relevant professionals and organizations, and prepare oneself for launching a successful career
in the industry.
We strive to build future ready managers who are well equipped with the knowledge and skills
to contribute to organizations and individuals positively in the Technology Domain.

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