What I learned at a Product Management Bootcamp
Summary of my learnings on product development
I recently attended a four-week Product Management bootcamp conducted by Anusha Jain. Although I have collaborated extensively with Product Managers in my role as Data Analyst, I wanted to understand all the different aspects of product development and the broad spectrum of PM responsibilities. The bootcamp experience was excellent and informative. Below is a brief summary of my learnings. Please note that I have covered only few important points very briefly here; the bootcamp consisted of many more lessons.
- Product Development Cycle -
The first stage is the idea conception. While planning what to build or how to build, we need to keep in mind the customer need, existing competition, technological feasibility & ease of use for the target audience.
Next step is the user research to understand user pain points and test the viability of our idea. While checking viability, market research and competitor analysis too help in keeping us honest.
After finalising feature details, we start designing the product/features and iterate based on user feedback on the initial mockups. Next we move to detailing the feature implementation plan and develop product roadmaps. After development cycles and diligent testing cycles, we are ready to launch the MVP in conjunction with Marketing and Sales team and post the go-ahead from Legal team.
Post launch of the MVP, we need to constantly monitor the performance of the feature/product based on some key metrics. A/B Testing is a useful tool to test different ideas for optimising the key metrics in product growth phase.
2. User Research —
Once we have a product/feature idea, we need validate our hypothesis and check if our idea has any takers. We want to completely understand our users inside out (demographic & psychographic attributes, core needs, pain points etc.)
User research can be a combination of qualitative (user interviews) and quantitative (surveys) responses. While surveys are great to measure magnitude of intent or effect, the user interviews provide deep insight into actual user needs or pain points or unearth hitherto unknown issues.
Some of the User Interview guidelines include asking users open-ended questions which can’t be answered by simple yes or no, not asking leading or hypothetical questions, not influencing their response by showing our emotions or sharing our opinions or product ideas.
Mapping user’s journey from the first interaction with our product to the last interaction helps identify important gaps/inefficiencies in our product.
3. Prioritising feature development —
User research (or even scanning product backlog) may lead to many new feature ideas. However due to time constraints and development costs, we need to prioritise feature development. Below frameworks help decide feature prioritisation —
A. Value vs. Effort —
Slotting the features in the appropriate quadrant of the above graph, will help decide its priority.
B. MoSCoW Prioritisation —
C. RICE Framework —
We can also design our own custom framework where each feature in the feature list is scored against some important parameters (like ease of implementation etc.) and the overall score is added for each feature. The feature with highest score is prioritised for implementation .
7. User Experience Design—
Indra Nooyi once said “Design is everything that you embed in a product/offering that romances the consumer and draws them to the shelf to experience the product”. Such is the importance of good design in product success. I learnt about the Gestalt Principles in the bootcamp and how designers across the world use them to create aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand interfaces. Gestalt Principles are principles of human perception that describe how humans group similar elements, recognise patterns and simplify complex objects to simple images.
Gestalt Principles for designing —
Usability of a product depends on — ease of using the product, how quickly and accurately can users perform their tasks through the product, whether users find the product pleasant to use and if the product can handle majority of error cases and recover quickly from them.
I also learnt about ten different heuristic evaluation (usability inspection) methods which help identify any design issues in the user interface during testing phase.
8. Competitor Analysis
Evan Williams and Biz Stone had initially designed a platform to create and share podcasts. However, after Apple launched podcast support for iTunes, Williams and Stone analysed their competitor’s adoption rate and CAC and decided they couldn’t compete against Apple. Instead they doubled-down on making their offering simple and pivoted to launch Twitter, a highly successful micro-blogging social media platform.
Analysing competitors for their features, brand positioning, user experience, speed, funding, revenue and user base is essential in understanding how our offerings appear in comparison. Competitors can be direct (same problem-products-target market), indirect (same problem, different products-target market), potential (same problem-products, different target market)and substitute (completely different solution that can replace our solution).
9. Final Case Study
The Bootcamp concluded with submission of a case study project. For my submission, I worked on a problem I personally face — search and sort watchlist and create custom watchlists on Netflix. My case study included Netflix user personas, user journey mapping, wireframes for a few features, prioritising features through a framework and finally a metrics framework to track the feature performance post launch (I have written about metrics frameworks in my previous post). My final deck can be found here. Below I have attached a few snapshots from the deck to get you interested :)
Conclusion —
One of the quote’s Anusha used in the bootcamp remains my favourite takeaway —
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein
