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Table of Contents

1. What is Product Manager Role? ......................................................................................................................... 2

2. What is a Product Development Lifecycle? ........................................................................................................ 3
3. Competitive Market Analysis .............................................................................................................................. 3
3.1 Market sizing approaches ............................................................................................................................ 3
3.2 Feature Triage .............................................................................................................................................. 3
3.3 Techniques to find Known and Unknown competitors ................................................................................ 4
3.4 Categorizing the Competitors ...................................................................................................................... 4
3.5 Understanding Competitors on 5 dimensions.............................................................................................. 5
3.6 Feature Table ............................................................................................................................................... 5
3.6.1 Competitive Feature Analysis ............................................................................................................... 5
3.6.2 Building a new Feature ......................................................................................................................... 5
3.7 Monitoring Competitors............................................................................................................................... 6
3.8 Monitoring multiple channels for data ........................................................................................................ 6
4. Customer Development ...................................................................................................................................... 7
4.1 Four Stages of customer development ........................................................................................................ 7
4.2 Building Customer Personas......................................................................................................................... 7
6. Designing and Running Experiments .................................................................................................................. 8
6.1 Minimum Viable Product (MVP) .................................................................................................................. 8
6.2 Why PMs use MVP approach ....................................................................................................................... 8
6.3 Seven Steps of running MVP Process ........................................................................................................... 8
7. Conceptualizing the solution .............................................................................................................................. 9
8. Metrics/KPIs – Defining Goals and Measuring Results ..................................................................................... 10
8.1 Types of Metrics ......................................................................................................................................... 10
8.2 Picking up good metrics ............................................................................................................................. 10
8.3 Using HEART metrics Framework ............................................................................................................... 10
8.4 Using AARRR(Pirates) Metrics .................................................................................................................... 11
9 Building the Product – Project Management .................................................................................................... 12
9.1 EPIC............................................................................................................................................................. 12
9.2 EPIC Specs................................................................................................................................................... 12
9.3 User Stories and Acceptance Criteria ......................................................................................................... 13
9.4 Estimation and Velocity .............................................................................................................................. 13
9.5 Roadmapping ............................................................................................................................................. 13
9.6 Prioritization ............................................................................................................................................... 14
10 Working with People and Stakeholders........................................................................................................... 15
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1. What is Product Manager Role?

A Product Manager:
1. Acts as Communication Hub
2. Is of 3 types
3. Has lot of ideas for product from multiples sources
4. Finds real user needs from requests
5. Gets feedback both from directors and daily users.
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2. What is a Product Development Lifecycle?

Product Development Lifecycle consist of following 7 stages:

Description Development Stage Focus

Conceive User problem, solution, focus areas
Plan Market Research, Business Case, Customer Interview, Features, Roadmap
Develop Timelines, Features, User Stories, MVP Testing
Iterate Early MVP, Feedback from Users, alpha beta testing
Launch Positioning of product, Working with Marketing Team
Steady State Watching reporting metrics, continue steady state
Maintain/Kill Sunset, End of Life, might not be fitting in company’s vision

3. Competitive Market Analysis

3.1 Market sizing approaches
1. Top down approach
a. Based on, finding total market and then estimating what will be your share of
market.
b. Basically, it’s a more optimistic approach
2. Bottom up approach
a. Based on thinking, about current sales of similar or relatively close product,
estimating how much sales can you capture
b. It’s a more conservative approach.
Tools and Techniques
 Google Market report about the company.
 Using Compete.com to find out traffic of competitor website.
 Using Google AdWords keyword tool to find more about competitor.
 Checking Twitter, Reddit for competitor feedback.

3.2 Feature Triage

Following are some goals/metrics for Feature Triage for any PM:
 Get your product more users
 Make your users happy
 Enhances your brand
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3.3 Techniques to find Known and Unknown competitors

1. Known Competitors: Google – Your company versus, and it will provide list of known
competitors.
2. Unknown Competitors: To find unknown competitors first you should have clear
answers to following 2 questions:
 Understanding of the problem that your Feature/Product solves.
 And for whom it solves the problem?
Following techniques can be applied further:
 Channel the type of users, how do they complain about problems. Google the
companies that are using same verbiage.
 Google individual complaints online
 See the advertisements on top of the complaints search.
 Connect the dots, Google will do it for you.

3.4 Categorizing the Competitors

Once the list of both known and unknown competitors are there. They can be
categorized in following 4 categories

Competitor Characteristics Action

Type
Direct  Same Target Audience.  Try to be competitive to these.
 Similar solution to the problem.
 Customers have to make choice between your
product and direct competitor’s product
Indirect  Much large audience including yours  Try not to lose too many customers to
 Solution to bigger problems these
Potential  Same Target audience  Make sure they can’t do it easily
 But they don’t address problem like you do
 They don’t have remotely product line as you.
 They are like tuna in Salmon net.
Substitute  Solve core problems with substitute  Be at least better than those.
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3.5 Understanding Competitors on 5 dimensions

Dimension Description
Product Core  Understanding Product Team, how good it is.
 Size of user base will help in dominating the market by that company.
Size of User Base  Receives more press coverage.
 Helps in striking deals with other companies
 Apple music (1 billion) vs Spotify (15 million) users
Design  Usability and Simplicity
 Example, Apple
 Perception of people about your brand.
Brand  Company Loyalty.
 Charge Higher prices.
 Both have positive and negative impacts
 Build it, turnaround it and ship it.
Speed  Flatter organisation structure, faster the turnaround speed.
 Hierarchy slows down speed.

3.6 Feature Table

3.6.1 Competitive Feature Analysis

F Direct Competitors
e
a
t
u
r . #1 #2 #3 #4 You
e
s Price 350 200 389 299 499
& Reliability Yes No Yes No Yes
F Aesthetics 4/10 6/10 5/10 6/10 7/10
a
c Weight 190g 84g 114g 120g 89g
t
o Usability 5/10 7/10 6/10 8/10 7/10
r
s

Feature Table not only helps in comparing your product features with that
competitors but also helps in answering following critical questions:
3.6.2 Building a new Feature
Ques1: How would you would build a new feature based Feature Table
comparison?
Ques2: Would you build a feature that will beat them all on all categories
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3.7 Monitoring Competitors

Competitors position keep on changing. Following 3 events must be kept under close
watch.

Events Impact
Funding Will help to speed up, can increase product team, improve design,
advertisement.

Acquisition Done for users or design

New Features Can be checked from various social sites and company site.

3.8 Monitoring multiple channels for data

Building a product is big risk. As a PM, you should be monitoring following channels for
information:
 Internal Feedback
 User Test Data
 Online Feedback
 Analytics Statistics
 News
 Market Trends
 Vulnerability w.r.t scaling of data
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4. Customer Development
4.1 Four Stages of customer development
Stage 1
 Figure out customers who
you are targeting
 Pre-Product
 Following 3 criteria can be
used to customize
customer groups:
1. Customer segment size
2. Pain: Payment
3. Accessibility to users
 Post-Product
1. Existing customer base
2. People paying/engaging
3. Leads already there.
 Customer Discovery
1. Problem-Soln Fit
2. Proposed MVP
3. Proposed Sales Funnel/s
Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4
 Find candidates that  Reach out + make them  Interview them
match target group agree to talk
 Pre-Product  Pre-product  Pre-product
 4 places to search  Sending out  Do’s
1. LinkedIn mails/messages that are: 1.Talk about Pain Areas
2. Forums – Quora, reedit 1. Short 2. Create comfortable env.
3. Twitter 2. Personal  Don’t’
4. Competitor’s social 3. Valuable 1. Talk about ur opinion
page 4. Make the customers 2. React Negatively
valuable 3. Force conversation
5. Doesn’t look like sales  Follow 5w framework
promotion.
 Post-Product  Post-product  Post-product
 4 places to search Sending out  Do’s
1. Live Chat mails/messages that are: 1.Talk about Pain Areas
2. Company Blogs 1. Short 2. Create comfortable env.
3. Power Users 2. Personal  Don’t’
4. Twitter 3. Valuable 1. Talk about ur opinion
4. Make the customers 2. React Negatively
valuable 3. Force conversation
5. Doesn’t look like sales  Follow 5w framework
promotion.
Framework (Prof. Steve Blank)
 Customer Validation  Customer Creation  Company Building
1. Product Mkt Fit 1. Scale Execution 1. Scale Organisation
2. Business Model 2. Scale Operations
3. Sales & Marketing
Roadmap

4.2 Building Customer Personas

 Personas are aggregate behaviour of user groups (segmentation of customers)
 Can be create using following steps
o Interview large number of customer groups
o Find a user behaviour
o Give it a real name
o Give it a description
o Give a background information
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6. Designing and Running Experiments

6.1 Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Minimum Viable Product is the smallest amount of product built with least amount of
resources, given to customers, in order to get real-time feedback and find out the
idea/particular approach will work or not.
MVP also leads to Fail Fast concept:
Stages Description
Stage 1 Run MVP experiments quickly
Stage 2 Collect more data
Stage 3 More likely to find a successful product

6.2 Why PMs use MVP approach

 PMs in big companies use MVP to:

 Cover Risk of losing time
 Cover risk of losing money
 Opportunity cost
 PMs in start-ups use MVP to:
 Survive otherwise die

6.3 Seven Steps of running MVP Process

Steps Step Details
1. Figure out  Assuming, his step is already done in competitive market analysis.
Problem/ Solution
set
 Prioritize assumptions based on risks
 Test assumptions using Risk/ Difficulty framework. Test in following sequence:
2.Idenify #1 - High Risk, Low Difficulty
assumption and #2 - High Risk, High Difficulty
riskiest ones #3 - Low Risk, High Difficulty
#4 - Low Risk, Low Difficulty

3. Test hypothesis  As PM, the hypothesis could be: We believe Subject has a problem because of
around reason. If we take this action, this metric will improve.
assumptions
 Most of time hypothesis outcome will appear in middle of true and false. You will
4. Establish need to establish “Min Criteria of Success” to decide if product is worth building
Minimum Criteria or not.
for success (MCS) For Start-ups – MCS is generally validation metrics, economic viability of product.
For Big Companies -MCS is basically cost-benefit analysis, identifying at what
point the benefits outweigh the costs.
 Following are different types of MVPs:
1. Email MVP
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5. Pickup type of 2. Shadow button MVP

MVP and testing 3. 404 and coming soon page MVP
strategy 4. Explainer Videos MVP
5. Fake Landing Page, pitch experiment MVP
6. Concierge service MVP
7. Piecemeal MVP
 Testing Strategy is all about understanding:
Risk: For product or company hoe risky are the assumptions
Difficulty: How much efforts you need to make to test the assumptions.

Following Risk-Difficulty Framework to come up with Testing Strategy

6. Execute MVP  This Step is about executing MVP based on strategy decided in previous step.
experiment
7. Evaluate and  This step is about collecting Quantitative and Qualitative data from previous step
learn from the and comparing it with MCS.
Experiment  Quantitative data will tell whether your experiment passed of failed and
Qualitative data helps to understand WHY the customer did what they did.

7. Conceptualizing the solution

Following are different techniques that can be applied for conceptualizing the solution:

Techniques Techniques Details

1. Wireframing  Wireframing is way to communicate ideas/features.
 Wireframe is the first step to materialize your idea (in low fidelity) & to get a feedback.
 Wireframes are visual guides that lay rough structure of where the content is going to go.
 Wireframing Tools like Balsamiq, Axure can be used
2. Mock-ups  Mock-ups are static Display of what the final product looks like.
 Have more details than wireframes
 They are done by the designers
 Mock up Tools like Photoshop, Illustrator are used
3. Prototypes  Prototypes provides usability on top of Mock-ups
 They have basic interactions and high Fidelity
 Potential user flows and associated problems are visible
 Prototype tools like Keynote, Proto.io can be used.
4. Sketching  Sketching is basically designing say a Feature Web Page. Following are the question that goes
into the thought process:
1. What is the point of making or context of making this page
2. What should the users be able to do?
3. Looking at the other websites to further get inspiration
 Important outcome of this step is the function and not the visual design.
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8. Metrics/KPIs – Defining Goals and Measuring Results

The entire Product Manager role revolves around Metrics/KPIs. They are nothing but feedback
loops – the more frequently you are getting accurate feedback, the more effectively you are going
to manage that.

8.1 Types of Metrics

Types of Metrics
Growth and Activation Metrics
Retention Metrics
Engagement Metrics
User Happiness Metrics
Revenue Metrics
What they Track
 Track and Measure how product is growing.
 Example, finding out how many users have downloaded the app and
how many have activated the app.
 Track how many people are coming back to use your app
 Example, Find out how many returning users are retained and how
many are resurrected.
 How many times users are engaging with the app.
 This metrics is tailored to each company and product
 Track how happy your users are
 Example, no of complaints, app store rating
 These are some of the difficult metrics to measure but are very
important.
 Track how much revenue you are making.
 Example, Customer Life Time Value, Acquisition cost etc

8.2 Picking up good metrics

Before picking up a metric, you should be clear of the purpose of the metric whether it
is for Exploratory or Reporting. Once decided upon the metric, make sure your metrics
has following characteristics:
 They should be Understandable
 They are measured as Rate or Ratio
 They are Correlated
 They are Changeable

8.3 Using HEART metrics Framework

HEART framework is a reporting framework. Table below show what this acronym stands for:

Alphabet Metric Correct Description

Sequence
H Happiness 5 How happy your user is
E Engagement 3 How engaged your user is in short term
A Adoption 1 How many users tried your product
R Retention 4 Are your users returning back
T Task Success 2 What is the most import that your users should do
with your product, and are they doing it.
* Correct Sequence represent Metric Sequence in Customer Journey with a Product
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Example below shows on how to use HEART metrics framework to deliver app based
Spiked Lemonade.

8.4 Using AARRR(Pirates) Metrics

Commonly used with Software and Service start-ups. Table below show what this acronym
stands for:

Alphabet Metric Description

A Acquisition Metrics for acquiring your user
A Activation Metrics that show that customer is activated, signed up and
engaged with the app
R Retention Customer come back to use your app
R Referral Are users happy enough happy with your app that they
refer to others?
R Revenue Metrics shows that you are making revenues from your
users.
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9 Building the Product – Project Management

Starting from Top, everything that company builds comes from company’s mission/vision.
Different teams come up with different initiatives in order to reach the goals. These
initiatives are generally new Client Features or new functionalities in their respective
products.

9.1 EPIC
If we group or sum up these Features or functionalities together, it is often called as EPIC.
An EPIC has following characteristics:
 Generally, whatever a Product Team do is not EPIC. An EPIC contains new features or
functionalities for client.
 EPIC is longer piece of work that takes more than 1 Sprint to Build.

9.2 EPIC Specs

EPIC spec sheet are documents that contain all the requirement for building a product. Its
purpose is to allow everyone to read it and understand what they have to build. Following
are main 4 areas of EPIC specs sheet:
#1 Introduction
 Summary of what features you are building for and why are you building them.
 What Metrics you are trying to improve
 Links to specific documentation
 Marketing Plans, Legal requirements
 Early Wireframes
#2 Product Requirements
 What is required for specific features you want to build
#3 Design Requirements
 You plus designer fill this Section
#4 Engineer Requirements
 This section is mainly filled out by engineers after you discuss details with them.
 It contains what must be done on technology in order to achieve goals.
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9.3 User Stories and Acceptance Criteria

User stories are a way to describe the features or functionality that we are goanna build for the
end user. Generally, user stories follow the format – As user A, I want to do B, so that I can C.
Once user stories are ready they get inside Project Management tool like JIRA written as tickets
under EPIC->Feature project. These tickets can be moved in the – “To Do”, “In Progress”, or
“Done” categories.

Acceptance Criteria are a set of conditions that software must satisfy in order to be considered as
complete. The function of Acceptance Criteria is very specific on how a feature should function.

As a Product Manager, it is your responsibility to test the completed user stories before
approving them to be released in the public.

9.4 Estimation and Velocity

From product to product, software engineers are building things in different ways, in different
languages and things are changing all the time. In this type of scenario, estimation becomes very
difficult. Under these conditions, you can estimate accurately using something called velocity.

Story Points: measures the difficulty of a task by using a rating system that everyone in the
company understands.

Velocity: is the number of story points that we are able to cover or accomplish in a 2 weeks’
sprint. Say for example, if we have 5 user stories each with 6 story point, and we are able to cover
only 3 out of 5 in 2 weeks’ sprint. Then velocity = 6 + 6 + 6 = 18

In long term accuracy of these estimations keep on increasing.

9.5 Roadmapping
Every company has different way of doing road mapping. Generally, it is quarterly based.
However, with the type of difficulty that I have discussed previously in Estimation. It
become really difficult to accurately predict roadmap on a quarterly basis.

However, we have used following alternative for road mapping – Creating 3 buckets
 Bucket 1 – Near Term work
 Bucket 2 – Mid Term work
 Bucket 3 – Long Term Work
This method keeps everyone aligned but doesn’t impose strict deadlines.
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9.6 Prioritization
Prioritization is plays a major part of a Product Manager’s roles. Any of the three listed methods
can be used for prioritization:

1. Assumptions Testing
Prioritizing based on assumptions, implementing riskiest assumptions first. Following
framework can be used:
 Assign each assumption on a scale of 1-10
 Rate the importance of doing that on scale of 1-10
 Add these values and sort the assumptions based on that.

2. The BUC method

BUC stands for
a. Business Benefits
b. User Benefits
c. Cost

Score these dimensions on 1-10.

 Add the score of benefits and subtract the cost to get the final score
 Prioritize your tasks based on these scores, with highest on the top.

3. The MOSCOW method

Organize your tasks based on following categories:
a. Must – things you absolutely have to build
b. Could
c. Should
d. Would
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10 Working with People and Stakeholders

Working with Engineers : I generally keep following things in mind while communicating
with Engineer:
 When you pitching a feature, make sure you have good idea of where the feature is
going to go in the future.
 Before going to engineering team try to do some work upfront like checking logs, or
looking up data.
 Watch out for tech debt.
 Tech team should be active stakeholder and not just an agency to handover the
requirements.
Working with Designers:
 Give designers their creative freedom
 Don’t treat designers as an agency, ask them for feedback
 Collaborate and not just tell designer what to do
 Always talk about user problems first and solutions second. Let them come with best
solutions.
Working with Executives:
 Be brief in your communication with Executives
 Always speak in terms of business impact. Explain the things in terms of revenue and
metrics