Terms You Need to Know as a Product Manager
Initiatives — Actions/tasks performed in order to reach goals that a company’s management team develops which fit to a larger vision.
Example: Translate the app into three other languages this year.
Releases — A grouping of new features or functionalities that are released to the public on a particular date.
Example: If we translated the app into three additional languages, we’ll have one release in February where all three languages are available to the public.
Epics — A grouping of one or more features and functionalities that you want to build and release.
Example: Translate the app to Spanish.
***Note: This might sound like a feature, which it is. But not all things a product team does result in a new feature for an outside user.
Example: You could have the epic “Migrate data to new database.” This wouldn’t be a feature for outside users, but must be done for internal purposes.
Epics are also defined as pieces of work that take longer than one sprint to build. Usually a product team will build out 3 to 5 epics during a quarter.
Epic Spec Sheet. Also called a Requirements Document. — Documentation that describes what it is you are building and why. It serves as a guide for your team as well as offers visibility into what you are doing for other teams who are interested.
There are four main parts:
- Introduction: Summary of what the feature you’re building is for and why.
- Product requirements: Detailed information on the feature you’re developing and what is required.
- Design requirements: To be completed by a PM and designer. Attach wireframes or hi-fi prototypes to help engineers better understand the requirements and what needs to be done.
- Engineering requirements: To be completed by an engineer. Can include database and technology requirements that must be done to support the new feature.
User Stories — A way to describe a thing you’re going to build that delivers some type of functionality to the end user.
Example: As a user, I want to send pictures in a direct message to my friends so that I can share my photos with them. As an X, I want to do Y so that I can Z.
Acceptance Criteria — A set of conditions that software must satisfy to be considered complete. It should be very specific and testable.
Example: Given I am a user and I click the “add picture” button in the direct message, I am presented with a popup window to choose the file I can upload, submit it with the upload button and see a preview of the uploaded image.
