Month1 - Module 1 - PM Design Thinking Transcription

Let's imagine your typical day, you order food on Zomato, travel with Uber and rent places
on Airbnb. Tablets have

replaced big screens and our earphones are wireless. All these amazing products and services didn't exist some years
ago. Today, we live in a rapidly changing world where it's important to stay on top of these changing market trends,
consumer behaviours and their needs. Customers need the solutions to their problems and they need it quick.
But how do you tap into the customer site and know exactly what kind of products customers want?
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Well, this is where the function of product management plays an important role.
Product management is a function within an organisation that thrives at the intersection of technology, the customer
and the business needs.

In this session, you will understand why product management is needed today, what the product management is all
about. And through some interesting anecdotes, you will learn how the product management landscape has evolved
over the years, how it is taking up prominence today among companies and customers alike. You will learn about the
importance of product managers who they are, what they do, what their roles and expectations are and how much
they influence a product in an organisation at large.
You will learn about the crucial skills that product managers must possess in their artillery. These skills can vary across
different disciplines and roles under product management. So you will learn about the different types of product
managers and how their daily work varies from one another.
Finally, you will learn about people who work within the domain of product management but aren't technically
product managers. You will understand how they work, how they are different from product managers and how the
communication takes place between the product managers and these people.
This session will serve as the first step in your journey towards understanding and implementing all these techniques
and frameworks to become a successful product manager.
In my experience within the product industry, I have seen the product management function grow tremendously.

I remember my first project at TCS, arguably India's premier technology solutions company. The first product that I
built was a web-based content management solution for a global volunteer organisation.
In my role, I worked on collecting requirements, designing screens and databases and then developing and testing
these features. Once the requirements were collected from the clients at the initial stage, we went into development,
only to share the final version with the customer after it was fully built.
We received a lot of customer feedback at that stage, leading to significant rework and frequent changes, which in
turn consumed a lot of time and resources. Even after implementing all these changes, the product were often not
up to the mark in terms of serving the customer needs.
This happened mostly because customers were never asked what their needs and problems were or they themselves
were not able to articulate it exactly what they wanted in the first place.

But now, with the influx of data and customer support, customers are much closer to the development process and
provide feedback regularly.
This means that the product management role has evolved a lot more with the additional responsibilities of market
research, understanding trends, regular interactions with your customers, keeping them at the forefront of product
development through sustained feedback and partnering and managing the requirements of stakeholders from
various internal teams.
Not to forget that measuring and monitoring the health of your product is also an important task. Now the product
development process is far more intricate than before. The product management field is an extremely challenging yet
lucrative and engaging career path for creative and analytical minds.
For those who want to play a critical role in the development of new consumer goods, business technologies,
software platforms and anything else that people use every day, product management poses a fantastic career
growth.

Product management is the intersection between building the right products and building the product right. They
work with customers, research teams and analytics to identify the right opportunities for the new products or
enhancements and hence figure out what is the right thing to build?
They then work closely with the engineering and design teams to make sure that it is built in the right way to satisfy
the customer needs and organisational goals. Think of chefs at a restaurant, what are some of their responsibilities?
Generally, a chef works on planning many important things such as what should be on the menu for the day, any
specials? What are the key ingredients required and their respective quality and quantities? What do the customers
think about the food and the experience? Would the customers recommend others to visit the restaurant on a
regular basis and much more?

A chef does not own the restaurant usually, but they share the overall vision of the owner to help them achieve their
goals. Just like the role of a chef at a restaurant, product management is a function within an organisation that guides
every step of building a product. Depending on who you ask, you might get a different definition of product
management.
When I think about product management, there are three key aspects that immediately come to my mind.

One is being obsessed with customers. It is an extremely important quality for product managers to have. It is
important because we need to understand customers needs and iteratively and incrementally work towards solving
these customer problems.
Product managers are supposed to be the voice of customers in any meeting they are in. They push the envelope for
design, engineering and marketing and a set of other teams to ensure that you are generating value for your
customers and helps in even more value for your business.
The second important point here is being data driven. Product managers need to be comfortable interpreting and
making sense of data. In the absence of data, the highest paid person's opinion is typically respected. And the third
key aspect that comes to my mind is influencing people and decisions.
In a lot of cases, your counterparts in engineering, design and other teams will not be reporting to you. So you need
to be able to influence people to do the right thing for the product and customers without having authority over
them. As a product manager, you are responsible for the success or the failure of the product. While this is extremely
fascinating, it is incredibly scary.

Product managers are most helpful in setting up the product vision and strategy, pitching and positioning new
product ideas and feature development, working with the engineering teams and design teams to bring products into
life, ensuring that each product meets the needs of the target users and customers and helping in getting their
products out in the market quickly and efficiently.
This helps organisations learn more about the customers interest and improve their product based on the relevant
feedback.

There are four stages in a product's life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Product manager wears
different hats in different stages of a product. Let's understand how the role of a product manager gets diversified
across these different stages.
As a PM trying to launch a new product in this phase, you will be required to use your innovation skills to find the
right gaps and ideate probable solutions. The aim is to reach the market with your product as early as possible. You
can test your product ideas with prospective customers, gain feedback and use this early customer feedback to
iterate.
Offerings like driverless cars, drone based delivery and the concept of metaverse all fall under this segment. These
concepts are still being tested. Only a few people have decided to adopt them so far. The PM's role in this stage is to
constantly collect feedback from these customers as well as from people who have not yet adopted the product.

Now we move in the growth stage. Once a product market fit is identified and the right customer segment is
identified as well, it's time to assert dominance in this particular segment. This is where the idea of growth hacking
comes into the picture. Here, product managers find creative and innovative ways to get more customers interested
in their products.
Let's take an example of Hotmail, one of the earliest web-based email providers. Hotmail found that advertising was
too expensive. The company came up with one of the very first growth hacks. It added the text- PS: I love you. Get
your free e-mail at Hotmail; at the bottom of every email sent out from that platform. This may sound silly, but the
move saw Hotmail's email signup rates skyrocket. What's more, Hotmail didn't even have to spend a single penny on
this growth hack.

Hotmail essentially turned every single user into a free advertisement for its services and hit a peak mark of
achieving a massive 3000 new signups per day. The company acquired a jaw-dropping 1 million users in 6 months and
crossed 2 million in the next few weeks. What Hotmail started back then now has become a common practice.
You might recall seeing the text sent from my iPhone at the bottom of your email today. This is quite similar to what
Hotmail did back in the day. As a PM in a company that is in the growth stage, it is important to find different ways to
grow your products market footprint and that too quickly. You may need to work closely with marketing, sale as well
as your customers to not only come up with new features, but also run new experiments to get quicker adoption.

Stage 3 is of a retention expert. Next is the maturity phase of the product, where the goal of the company is to
maintain its market leadership position and keep the customers for a longer period of time. In this phase, product
managers need to focus on customer retention and customer satisfaction, while decreasing the rate of customer
attrition in the middle of high competitive pressure.
Let's take an example of Coca-Cola. It has been around for many years and has reached its peak growth.

Even credit cards for that matter have reached maturity. They now actively advertise their products to reinforce their
brands to increase retention. In companies at a similar stage, product managers need to understand the changing
consumer needs and come up with lucrative features to prevent the customers from leaving.
The last stage in the product development lifecycle is for a solution seeker. Finally, the changing technology landscape
and consumer behaviour can push products to the end of life.
In this phase, the role of a product managers involves strategising to extend the products life by finding alternative
ways for the product to add value.
A good example of a product that comes to mind that is in the decline phase is newspapers, online websites,
e-newspapers and specific news apps like Inshorts and Daily Hunt are some creative solutions that product managers
and their teams have come up with.
This has helped increase readership and the active audience. Based on the company's strategy, product managers as
solution seekers need to continually innovate their offerings. They need to make critical decisions, whether to
enhance their current product offerings to meet the new market trends or shift their focus to new customer segment
to extend the life of the product.

As a product manager, you don't need to be an expert in everything, but you do need to know a little bit of all so that
you can effectively collaborate with various teams to meet the product goals. Let's take a look at some of the skills
that a must must-haves for all product managers.
Let's start with some hard skills. First is domain knowledge. Product managers need to have basic understanding of
the domain they are working in. Domain knowledge is the understanding of a specific specialised discipline or field.
This will help you make better decisions when it comes to your products growth.
In my career, I have spent most of my time in the talent management space. I have used and continue to use this
knowledge to improve the other products that are not in the same domain, but can benefit from this.

Recently I was working on building a new staff management software at Mindbody, a company in the wellness space.
Traditionally in the fitness studio management software, staff management systems are limited to managing their
staff profiles and their schedules.
However, I was able to suggest features around talent management such as tracking their goals for the staff as well as
their engagement. This helped the fitness studio owners to keep their staff happier, track their progress and work
more effectively. We received a lot of positive feedback from the customers when we validated these ideas.
The second hard skill is business acumen. It is important for product managers to be business savvy. Developing one's
business competency isn't just for those in the leadership position. Understanding the cost of building a product and
how the product is being sold is the first step towards building this knowledge.
You need to be comfortable reading your company's financial statements. You could also attend the town halls where
business information is being shared by leadership. Suppose you need to decide which feature you should build next
for your product.
You know that recently your product has been facing a lot of outages due to stability issues. As a product manager
who prioritises the next work for their teams, you have a choice to make whether to invest in some new product
features or to make the existing offerings better.

In times like these, you need to use your business acumen. If the outages have caused many customer escalations,
you would want to prioritise the task of keeping the customers happy.
Next is product design and usability, which is another critical aspect that a product manager needs to work on.
Product managers need to be aware of the new design trends and collaborate with the design teams to provide a
world-class user experience that is intuitive and seamless.
What constitutes a superior design and user experience depends on the type of product that you are working with.

For an online product, it could be having fewer number of clicks to take in action and avoid clunky workflows. Ideally,
what solves the user's problem quickly efficiently and gives them an incentive to return to your product is crucial to
you enhance your customer experience.
The fourth hard skill that we'll talk about is technology. Product managers work very closely with the development
teams, understanding their work and the latest technology trends is important for the product managers. It can help
you understand how the product is being built.
Making a reusable scalable and stable product is imperative to their success. Last hard skill we'll talk about is market
and competition. Market trends and comparative pressure affect how a particular product is perceived and its
performance in the market.
Understanding and reading about the market trends and competitive pressure enables the product manager to
prioritise the right features that will help the product to maintain its competitive edge against other products.
Another important skill to becoming a successful product manager is developing product sense or product intuition.
It is the ability to dive deep into ambiguous problem spaces and divide these problems into smaller chunks that are
easy to understand.

It is the ability to think fast and intuitively understand what makes a product great. Product sense drives the product
managers ability to ruthlessly prioritise and work towards elevating customer value and business growth. The various
hard skills that we discussed in this module will help you build your product sense.
Once I was involved in a discussion with some teams on one of the enhancements we were working on. The problem
at hand was that the booking window for fitness classes opened at 12 in the midnight.
This was the case ever since the product was built, but due to Covid and limited capacity, the studios were
maintaining. This had become a challenge. Consumers had to wake up in the middle of the night to book their
preferred classes. Finally, the teams came up with a solution of cascading the booking times.
So a 6 am class can be booked at 6 am a few days in advance. Similarly, booking for a 7 am class would be done and 7
am a few days in advance and so on. When I heard the solution, I pointed out that this solution would not work for
studios that keep on changing their schedules.

Consumers would have to remember the timings throughout the day and they would have to always be on their
mobile phones to book the slots. A better solution would be to simply shift the booking time from 12 am to a more
friendlier time.
Let's say 8 am or even better let the studios choose the time they want to open their bookings for the day. Here, a
simple application of logic, intuition and good understanding of the fitness industry and the consumer behaviour
helped me take an effective judgment call.
Are all product managers the same? The responsibilities of a product manager depend on the stage of the product
life cycle. Along with your everyday role, as you become more specialised in certain areas, you could broadly start
identifying yourself among these different categories.

Let's start with outbound product managers. These product managers are closer to the customer and the business
than they are to the development teams. Their responsibilities involve managing customer relationships, performing
competitive analysis and deciding the product's vision and strategy.
They are also responsible for the products' marketing and planning to get their products to the market quickly. The
role is perfect for someone who is good at multitasking, loves building trust and managing stakeholder relationships.
As an outbound product manager at Mindbody, I am primarily focused on the go to market activities and customer
interactions. My job is to increase adoption and fit of our products. Therefore, the influence of my role stretches
across the entire product life cycle, from strategy to planning and to implementation and getting the products to the
market faster.
Recently, we launched the first ever video conferencing platform focused on fitness businesses. When we started
exploring this opportunity, it was my job to discuss how our customers conduct live online classes today and what
they would like to see in the product.
As an outbound product manager, since our role involves managing customer relationships, I collaborate with the
sales teams to keep a check on the needs of our prospect customers as well.

While developing the video conferencing platform, we received some valuable insights around how reporting was a
major challenge for the customers relying on Zoom and Facebook to conduct the live classes.
Customers manually had to check who attended the classes one by one. Next after collating, all these needs and
problem statements, our first version of a simple video conferencing platform where participants received a link to
join the call in this situation. I worked closely with the general PMs, who were closer to the design and the
development teams to feed such information to help design a possible solution to the problem.
Once the development team is ready with the new product or even a new feature, I sync up with the marketing team
to spread the word internally and externally. We plan the go to market and pricing strategies together.

We work together to develop marketing collaterals like health manuals, support articles, product announcements
and to publish them to our customers. I also help conduct webinars to talk about the launch of new products and
features.
Once the video conferencing platform was live, I continued to collaborate with the sales, support teams as well as
our customers to collect regular feedback. To improve our offerings, we collected feedback around how instructors
needed to find a way to quickly mute all the participants at once.
This seemed like such a simple thing, but it cropped up when customers actually started using the system. It was my
job to collect such feedback and make sure that the teams can iterate on it quickly.
Finally, I also had to keep the executive teams informed about the progress and the launch of these crucial product
elements and get the regular feedback. This helps us stay aware and align with the company's vision and strategy.

The simple platform we launch now has live streaming and video library features that are being used by thousands of
customers across the globe.
The second type of product managers are data science and AI product managers. They utilise the power of data and
use it for building and developing a product or a feature. Every product manager uses data to guide their product
decisions. However, data product managers help in collecting and organising, storing and sharing the data within the
organisation.
The data is used to make informed product and business decisions. A data product manager is primarily responsible
for finding ways to use data throughout the product life cycle. They use this data to personalise user experience,
design recommendation algorithms, increase customer retention and identify cross-selling and upselling
opportunities.
This role is suitable for any product manager who loves data and making sense out of it. We then have tech product
managers who possess a strong technical background that is typically focused on more technical aspects of the
product. They help in delivering API strategies and structures.
A technical product manager works more closely with the engineering teams than the business or sales or marketing
teams of the organisation. The fourth product managers that we are going to talk about are the growth product

managers who identify the company's growth opportunities and direct their teams efforts to drive these
opportunities.
A growth product manager works on improving a specific business metric to grow revenue and profits in the long
term. These PMs love experimenting and launching initiatives to drive products to reach the next level of scale,
impact and profitability. Each role requires skills that are specific to their respective type, but the core skills of a
product manager with respect to the product remains unchanged across any of these categories.
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Let's imagine your typical day, you order food on Zomato, travel with Uber and rent places

on Airbnb. Tablets have

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