4 essential “cards” every Product Manager should have inside their wallet
Product Manager is one of the role I found quite challenging throughout the journey of my career. I started my career as an IT Consultant a few years ago, and then I moved forward as a Business Analyst in the next company. Since then I tried to map out what I would become in the future. I have never thought about becoming a Product Manager before, but the experience, skill, time, and the opportunity brought me here to learn more.
I’m not going to share the details about the Product Manager role here. As we know, almost all tech companies use this role to be the person in charge of anything related to their products, features, or services.
I’m going to share more about the essential must-haves for every Product Manager to deliver the product smoothly. Well, maybe not always 100% smooth 😀 but at least we can prepare it better with these essentials.
I’m using the analogy of cards in a wallet (like the ATM card) because similar to these essentials, we carry and use them almost everyday, and we can always add more value to them by adding some amount of balance.
If this sounds like something you would love to know more, keep on reading!
Research Card
As a Product Manager we have to understand the market to ensure that our idea or solution is effective enough to solve and meet their current needs. Research can answer all of the important and foundational questions such as:
- Who is the user?
- Does the user/market agree and accept the solution?
- Who is the competitor?
- What does the competitor do to solve it?
To answer, we can start by collecting and analyzing data, create a comparison matrix by benchmarking some competitors, conducting direct user research by interview, or blasting a set of questioners to the audience to get more feedback from the real user. We can collaborate with the UX research team to do the research.
From the insights we get, the hope is we can see whether our proposed idea make sense to be built and whether the market would receive it well.
Managing ideas with strong data is a good way to start increasing and improving our balance in this card!
Backlog & Prioritizing Card
A product backlog is one of the powerful tools to convert ideas and solutions into an actionable working details of product development. These backlog items can come from any departments like business stakeholders, users, or even from some problems that occur at a time.
From the backlog list, we can see whether each items can be done “Now”, “Not now”, “Not at all”. Managing all the backlog with prioritization method is an effective strategy to define the urgency.
I like to calculate the prioritization using a formula based on these aspects:
- Impact of the targeted achievement (can be target of business impact, cost efficiency, or operational effort)
- Effort sizing and cost needed to build
- Capacity of the resource
- Target date/time
Prioritize each of the backlogs with ranking system and make sure to stay aligned with all stakeholders involved. Then we can wrap it up as the product roadmap strategy. Get ready to constantly update this card because these needs can keep moving up or down according to the relevant situation.
Product Specification Card
Write everything about your product or idea. At Blibli, we use the term PRD or product requirements document. This document contains all aspects of the key product. I can say that this card is a mandatory one for Product Manager to help bridging all of the technical requirements, so the stakeholders and technical team will stay in line about the scope.
What’s exactly inside this PRD? You can formulate the document by answering some of key questions words below.
Background and objective
This is a section to break down customer’s problem we are trying to solve and how it relates to the end goals. This will establish the high-level purpose of the product, including what we want to accomplish and who the product is for. Here are some questions we can use to define in this section:
- Why do the user need this product?
- What is the problem to solve through this product?
- Who are the user impacted by this product or feature?
Success metric
To measure the achievement of a product, we must first know the value. That’s why defining some key metrics of the product is particularly important. By creating a goal and setting the target of the product, we’re able to know how far the product can perform in the market. Here are some examples of a target achievement:
- Improve X% of active users within 6 months.
- Revenue uplift up to USD X million.
- Reduce the marketing cost to X% in a year.
Scope and feature
In this section, we break down the scope and features of the product by converting it into feature description, along with the user story, user journey, and the UI/UX prototype including all the possible use cases.
User story is a common tool in the agile system to help us see what the problem to solve, why the problem needs to be solved, and who needs it. We can also define it together with the acceptance criteria for each scope of feature. Here is an example of a user story with the acceptance criteria.
User story:
As a buyer, I want to be able to use debit bank account in my e-wallet as the payment option, so I do not need to bring my physical debit card everywhere.
Acceptance criteria:
Given that user is ready to pay the purchase in checkout page,
When user has their payment credential stored in e-wallet connected,
Then user can choose debit accounts from e-wallet option to pay the purchase.
Make it as detailed as possible to avoid misunderstanding within the team and to make sure there is no scope left behind. This can help the team, especially QA, to break down all the scenario cases for testing. Don’t forget to also put the out-of-scope scenario if any limitation occurs.
Targeted & Proposed timeline
I use these 2 questions to define this section:
- “When does the product need to be launched to the market?”
Product Managers need to set the targeted or estimated time to define when the product can be used. This can give everyone involved a view of how urgent the product is in the market. We can discuss with the technical team to define the possible effort needed to achieve the targeted time. - “How and where is the product going to be received by the market?”
For this part, we can work with the business team to define the market plan after releasing the product. We should discuss and create a strategy to deliver the product to the targeted market.
It’s possible to have it released in phases if we have a big targeted market, make it more flexible and suitable with market conditions at that time. In practice, we can put this for the high-level plan during the product development.
Evaluation Card
As a Product Manager, we should maintain the productivity and performance of the product. To monitor, we can review and evaluate traffic performance and achievement data periodically. We can use various dashboards to help us review the product.
Beside that, we can measure user satisfaction as well as by collecting all the feedback from the user. Try to do an analysis to find out what improvement we can do next so we can increase performance and user satisfaction.
We have enough balance in all cards now, so what should we do next?
Share the balance with all related stakeholders, then use it as our asset to build and deliver the product going to the market.
After all, as a Product Manager it’s essential to keep communicating and keeping relationship in both internal and external hurdles to ship a great product.
That’s everything I can share about cards in my wallet so far. I will be continuing my role as a Product Manager for Wallet and Financial Services projects at Blibli so I can share my next stories to you some other times.
Do you have any other tricks to manage your cards as a Product Manager? Feel free to share them with me!
If you’re interested in applying for a full-time position or intern, Blibli is currently hiring! Send your resume to recruitment@blibli.com and get the chance to work with our PM and UX team and create our own unique stories.
