Product Management in a Nutshell
My name is Wessam Sonbol, I am a product guy developing products, analytics and identifying ways to resolve the data silos in healthcare since 2000. Over the past couple of years (since 2016), I have been providing product consulting and guidance to some of the top 500 companies. One item stood out to me the most, is the lack of what is a product and what is a project. Therefore, I decided to write a bit about my experience, and document a series about Product Management. So, consider this to be the first.
Is it a Product or a Project?
A project has a start and end date (give or take a few months) with a specific set of requirements, while a product does not. A product has a long term vision with many unknown set of criteria that can go on for years and iterated based on user experience and feedback.
How do we define a project?
Think of what it is that your team is after and how they are getting funded. Is the funding for a specific purpose (i.e. create reports) or for an idea that you want to try out, but has a long term impact. Is it a capability to empower your company to achieve better outcomes or can you sell monetize it?
How do we define a product?
An idea that can be monetized directly or indirectly. An idea that has short term and long term vision. The short term would be a way to define and idea on the product, while long term is where we would like to see this product 10 years later.
Product Funding
When thinking of products, the funding methodology shifts quite a bit from project. Putting on my product hat, the following are some main points that I want to start with making sure that this is a viable product. I start with ideating on paper, talking to potential clients, and looking at the market fit. Thinking in an agile fashion, I would look to fund the initial 6 months to prove the idea. With that in mind, I would have a specific outcome that I would be looking for by end of the 6 months.
Product Team
Let’s define the product team, who is usually involved and their role on the team. Depending on the organization, some of the roles will not be applicable. All the roles with an (*) most likely will not be available if you are a product company
Product Manager
CEO/champion for the product from inception through sunset (owns P&L and overall product value & ROI).
Product Owner (*)
The Product Owner is designed by the product manager. This person is primarily an internal facing role and extension of the product manager in terms of understanding the business, the voice of the customer and ability to work with the development team. They are accountable to the product manager to ensures that the features delivered meet the product vision and business value
Solution Architect
Define the solution architecture and working closely with the IT team on the current and future state
Tech Lead
Represent IT and responsible for leading the development team towards the feature in an incremental fashion
Marketing
Works closely with the product manager to define the market size and go-to market plan
Sales
Works closely with the product manager to define the product sales strategy
Operation Lead (*)
A business leader that can help provide guidance to the Product Manager on business problems and the product approach
Delivery Team
The delivery team does all the work to produce increments of working product functionality each iteration, including the design, development, integration, and testing of that functionality. To accomplish this a team needs to be cross-functional. Deliver all aspects of delivering a finished, working product at the end of each iteration. QA/QE, System analysts, developers, architects and tech. staff needed to develop the product
UX Designer
Part of the Dev. Team that is a collective of UI/UX. Measure usability, effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in terms of architectural design for the user.
Scrum Master
The scrum master is a coach in agile principles that creates collaborative and productive team environment . They facilitate software delivery via Agile practices and they remove impediments for the Scrum Team
Product Manager
I have seen a lot of product managers in my life, and most of them treat their products like projects, which takes away from the vision.
A good product manager should be a visionary, with good business sense and an understanding of what technology stacks mean. Being a good product manager means so much to any product…you need to be able to develop the vision, identify the problem, speak with your target customers, figure out the market fit and most of all be able to communicate all this to the development team.
Here is a good link to some traits of a good product manager https://medium.com/pminsider/ten-traits-of-good-product-managers-274937fbba86
Define The Problem
Every product starts with a problem to solve, and the way we solve it matters. So, what do we do?
- Define the problem
- Determine the target customer
- Identify why the problem needs to be solved
- Why will the customer be interested in solving this problem?
- Who is the competition and how are they different?
When working on the problem, we must understand the pain points and what the customer is currently doing about it.
One of my first startups focused on collecting patient data for post market studies, a type of clinical research that is agreed upon between the sponsor (pharmaceutical or medical device company) and the FDA to conduct a study on already approved drugs. The pain point we were after, was the manual operation, which was causing a delay in retrieving quality data and an increased
Target Customer
Once we identify the problem, we then need to verify it through a potential customer or someone that we believe does have this problem. The best way to do this is to talk to the potential customers. At this stage in the process, your ears are your best friends. Poke the customer with questions that will cause them to speak. Some hints when asking the right questions:
- Ask open-ended questions
- Ask clarifying questions in a friendly manner
- Dig deeper into the responses
- Ask un-comfortable questions
- Don’t interrupt and listen!
Roadmap
The product roadmap is extremely helpful for any product. It is a long term plan for what we are planning to build. This helps describe the vision of the product, provide guidance on the execution strategy, help gain alignment across stakeholders, and serves as communication material to be utilized through discussion with external customers and stakeholders.
In my experience, I have always tried to create a visual representation of my roadmap to show what I will develop first and what purpose that fulfills.
I like the visual diagram from Aha! on the product roadmap https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/product-roadmap
Prior to creating a roadmap, make sure you have identified the product fit, your potential customers are eager to see the product and most important keep them by your side as you develop the roadmap. Make sure to showcase your progress as early as possible
Stakeholders
As we go down the journey of building a product, we need to make sure we have an identified set of stakeholders that would help us through our roadmap and product strategy. In general, stakeholders are primarily those that have a stake in the success of the products, whether they will use it, help fund it, or simply have the expertise in why this product needs to happen. They often times also have influence and ways to navigate the product, whether it is from an internal organization aspect or commercialization.
Keeping a good relationship with your stakeholders can hold a lot of value, but remember that as a Product Manager, the success of the product remains on your shoulder, and the information stakeholders and others provide are for you to validate and identify where it fits in the roadmap.
The success of a product will be supported by the users, and ensuring that the right users, stakeholders, marketing and sales team are available throughout the journey is critical. Be user centric, be hungry for user engagement and don’t lose track of the short and long term vision
Wessam Sonbol is a product consultant with over 18 years of product management experience, 3 startups and 2 exits.
Email: wsonbol@gmail.com