Software

Product
Management
REBEL LEARNING HOUSE

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT TRAINERS

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What consumer apps we use?

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Which Business apps we use?

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Software operates World

➢Business Apps
➢ Project Management – Jira, Rally,
Confluence, Xmind, Miro, diagrams.net
➢ Wire framing & Prototyping- balsamiq,
invision, Figma
➢ Salesforce CRM, Workday, Payroll
Management, BMC Remedy ITSM Apps,
Service Now, Knowledge Management
➢ Work – Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack,
Office Apps (Word, Excel, PPT)
➢ Google Workspace Stack

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Great companies & products

▪Google -> Search

▪Apple -> Innovation

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What is the need of Product Manager?

➢Engineers – Coding

➢Designers - UX

➢Marketing – 7P’s

➢Sales – Customer acquisition

➢What role do product managers play?

➢Look at product team structure

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Youtube Org chart

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Product Team’s Structure

Product Manager1
Product Manager2

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Any other PM’s -> CEO ?
➢Andy Jassy

➢Elon Musk

➢Steve Jobs

➢ Travis Vanderzanden

➢ Harish Manwani – 1976 -> 2014

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Role of Product Manager

OUTSIDE IN

➢ Business Strategy and Technical Execution
➢ Understand Customer behavior and identify
customer problems
➢Identify Right opportunities - using data and
intuition
➢Define Product vision and success metrics
➢Work with engineers and designers to get the
right product built
➢Prioritize small no. of features that solve
customer problems
➢Say "no" to feature requests that don't fit the
customer needs

➢Competition analysis ➢Work with marketing to explain right Product

messaging to customers
➢Differentiator
➢Use: Soft influence, effective
communication, leadership and trust – not
orders 12/16/2021 10
Different roles: Let’s get clarity
❖Project Managers:
❖Owns schedule and Risk Management
❖Ensure Team meets deadlines (Release
dates)
❖Masters of schedules and Gantt charts
❖Do not represent customer

❖Program Managers
❖Focus on "getting it built"
❖Work with Engineering and Operations
❖Execution Masters

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Different titles

❖Microsoft calls its PMs – Program Managers

❖Apple splits the product manager role into
❖Engineering Program Manager
❖Product Marketing Manager
❖Titles @ BMC Software

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Types of Product Managers

Technical Product manager

◦ Strong tech side – they do not write code but understand the details of coding
◦ API – end customer is software developer

Strategic product manager

◦ Strong business orientation and understands the customer and strategy both

Growth product manager or mobile product manager

◦ more focused than general PM role
◦ Goals – to increase adoption rate, engagement rate and retention

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How to become a PM?
❖Engineer interested in Business “ If you want to learn something,
Read it.
❖BA to PM
If you want to understand something,
❖Trainings: Pragmatic Marketing,
write about it.
Behavioural Economics
If you want to master something,
❖Application of Learning
Teach it”

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Software Product Management –A Triad

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 How much technical do PMs have to be?

❖Know enough technical knowledge to work effectively with Engineers

❖Understand How Engineers built the product

❖Thinking common to coding:

❖ Top down design and bottom up implementation
❖ Think about big picture first and break it into small pieces : Epics -> Stories
❖ After building small pieces, combine them to get big picture

❖ Basic understanding of Frontend and Backend Technologies

❖ Frontend Technologies: HTML, CSS, Javascript
❖ CSS (Style sheet language and helps to add styles – such as fonts, colors, spacing)
❖ JavaScript (enables interactions between WebPages and the user, when you fill a form and hit submit)
❖ Backend Technologies: Java, .NET, Python, C#, VB
❖ Basic Understanding of RDBMS: MY SQL, Microsoft SQL server, PostgressSQL

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How much Business centric PMs have to be?

❖Understand the industry of the Company for which they are building products.
❖Who are the customers?
❖Who are major players in Ecosystem?
❖What differentiates one player from another?
❖How do Businesses make Money (Monetization Models)?
❖Basic finance concepts: Revenue vs Profit
❖Domain Expertise e.g: Fintech, Insurance, HR Management Systems, Telecom,
Travel, Manufacturing, IOT apps, Gaming Products, etc

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How much Design oriented a PM should be?

➢ PM must understand basic Design Thinking Concept

➢ PM must understand the Behavior driven Design Concept
➢ User Centered Design Approach
➢ UX Basics
➢ Visual Aesthetics
➢ Information Architecture
➢ Conversant with UX Designers and reviewing Prototypes
➢ Mobile app design vs Web app

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 Should Product Managers be Engineers only?
https://www.rebellearninghouse.com/post/should-software-product-managers-be-engineers-only

❖ Customer behaviour Understanding + Engineering

❖ Internal triggers -> Delight Users

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 What % of time does PM spend on technical activities?
❖ Product backlog grooming
❖Agile product development
❖Feature prioritization
❖Product Roadmap
❖ Project management
❖UX Design –wireframe& prototyping
❖User testing
❖Journey mapping
❖Data analysis

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How are products build ?
❖Different Methodologies

❖Software product development lifecycle – PM’s perspective

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Is there any other method of building Software products?

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3. Hybrid approach
PM’s plan things upfront
◦ Conduct user research, Competition analysis, Spot the right
opportunity
◦ Define problems that need to be solved.
◦ Then adopt lean approach to build product.
◦ Pivot when there are technical challenges or customer preferences
change in implementation phase.
◦ So, Plan + Change + adopt + fast + iterative

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 Software Product Development Lifecycle

1. 2. Designing 3. Building 4. Sharing 5. Assessing

Identifying the the the Solution the
and planning Solution Solution (Marketing) Solution
the Right
opportunity

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1. Identifying and planning the Right Opportunity

❖Core job of PM: find out what to build next/ What problems to be
solved?
❖Three Parts:
❖Strategically understanding Company
❖Create Opportunity Hypothesis
❖Validating Hypothesis

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Strategically understanding Company
❖ Who is Target Persona?

❖ How is Customer Value being created?

❖ Apple & Zerodha

❖ Company Expertise

❖ Competition analysis

❖ Environment Analysis

❖ Identify Company's goals: User Acquisition, Revenue, Customer satisfaction

❖ If the goal is revenue, Build features for Monetization

❖If the goal is to delight customers, build features that they will love, but wouldn’t expect.

❖Understanding Why does Company exist? What is the Company vision?

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Does it resonate with Apple’s goals?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLCqRM6C1jo&ab_channel=IMeanBusiness

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Creating Opportunity Hypothesis
❖ What is the right thing to work on next?

❖ Fixing a priority bug vs Building a new feature

❖ udchalo: bus, cab or train

❖ Source: observing Consumer behaviour patterns on web app

❖ A metric is a source of new Opportunity : Track no. of bus bookings, cab. Track the user
journey on the app and identify drop points -> Defect in the system.

❖ New product for train bookings

❖Understanding Company context and goals, talking to users, analyzing usage trends, bug
reports, feature request – will form input to a new Opportunity

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Validating the Opportunity
❖Limited time and resources, hence validating idea saves time and money

❖MVP: Minimum set of features that will address the opportunity well for most of target
customers and validate the opportunity. E.g: Dropbox ‘s video, Buffer MVP

❖Non-MVP approach: Build perfect product with all features and when released, Customers
don’t use the product.
❖Building features and iterating for a long time without releasing early and validation at
later stage. This is harmful to Business.

❖Post validation, Scope the Requirements

❖Product Requirements Document(PRD): Why Opportunity? Problem Definition, Success
metrics.
❖PRD : reference for Sales and support team to understand what's in the product and
Why?
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2. Designing the Solution
❖Work with Designers to create User Experience of Software app, Engineers gauge
feasibility in this phase

❖ User Research

❖ Information Architecture(In which order is Information presented to the User?)

❖ Wire framing (Where should information live on screen?)

❖ Prototypes: (high fidelity mockups that can be tested with customers to validate the
design)

❖Design is done when validation of prototype is complete and Engineering has agreed to the
viability of the Solution.

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3. Building Solution – Strength area
❖ Waterfall, Agile or Hybrid

❖Involved throughout Development: Prioritize Bugs, Test Software and Features, Scrum calls

❖ Negotiate on Technical debt, ask Engineering to write kludgey code that isn't suitable in the long term

❖ Tradeoffs between: Accepting short-term debt to provide customer value faster or even fixing tech
debt to make system stable

❖Many corner use cases are identified when Engineers build the solution which are missed in Product
definition

❖ During Development, share prototypes with internal team and customers to test and get early
feedback

❖ Pivot based on feedback

❖This Phase is complete only when Working Software is tested and Ready for Release
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4. Sharing the Solution/Product Marketing

❖Begins after Product is build and Ready for Release

❖Launch Product, Share it with World and let Customers know how Product solves the problem.

❖Product Messaging: Communicate the Value Proposition to Customers

❖Cred Ads during IPL and Ads with Rahul Dravid, Kapil Dev, Anil kapoor, Bappi Lahiri, Madhuri Dixit

❖How are products marketed in B2B ?

❖Plan for Beta testing
❖Creating Marketing Assets for a website
❖Working with key partners before release
❖Briefing the press or planning a launch event.

❖This phase is done, when Product is Generally available for Customers to use. Marketing campaigns
continue post launch also even when Development Team has moved to another version of the product.

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5. Assessing the Solution/Product Metrics & Analytics

❖Check Product metrics -> Actions

❖Recommendations to build in next

iteration

❖Are Users getting retained, acquired or

paying for the product? Is there a drop in
User journey?

❖After assessing How product is received

by customers, decide what to build next:
❖Should iterate more on the same
feature?
❖Move on to something else or
❖End of life for this feature/Product?
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Learning
➢ Software Product Management is a Triad

➢ Software Product Management Universe is vast and Technical skills alone wont suffice to
be successful in PM role.

➢Role of Product Manager and Org Structure in Product Companies

➢ Software development methodologies: Waterfall, Agile & Hybrid

➢Software Product Development Cycle

➢Identifying the Opportunity : Creating Opportunity Hypothesis, Validating Opportunity
➢Designing
➢Building
➢Sharing the Solution
➢Assessing the Solution
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Questions
“ A N I N V ES T ME N T I N
K N OW L EDGE P A Y S T H E B E S T
I N T ER ES T ”
- B ENJAMIN FR A N K L I N

“Take what you learn here and apply it

in your Projects”

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