Product management

Job description

Convincing your customer and your own development team that this new idea is worth it.

Responsibility without any actual authority

Who should be involved in the discussion?

Role doesn’t qualify, but customer exposure. Anyone having direct exposure to customer reality. Sales hearing, support investigating failures, engineer processing requirements.

What makes a good product

It’s all about delivering a cohesive product with well defined boundaries.

Avoid death by preference.

Every optional feature, configuration switch is hidden cost.

There is no small change. Do not use effort as a reason to make a product.

Organizing software product ideas

Group by customer impact:

Group by domain:

Elimination round

Can you

in under 70 chars each?

Score the survivors

Describing product ideas

Working backwards

Combination of a minimal press release and acceptance criterias.

Establish scope + create narrative:

  1. Title / Heading: Make the product identifiable for both customer and developers
  2. Sub-heading: Half sentence description who the market for the product is and what benefit they get
  3. Summary: Summary of the product and the benefits
  4. Problem

Define completion:

  1. Solution
  2. Proof
  3. How to get started
  4. Call to action, where to go next, what are the related products

Creating a roadmap

Mission, vision, strategy, roadmap

Product vision should fit in company vision.

Resource commitment

Product one-pagers and roadmap go to leadership for resource commitment.

Reading

Start reading here: How to get into product management

Communication

Email:

#sw #communication