12 IMPORTANT THINGS A PRODUCT MANAGER NEEDS TO DO BEFORE LAUNCHING A PRODUCT
Are you considering choosing product management as your career path? Then, this is a good read for you.
Generally, product managers (PM) are considered the middleman of UX, tech, and business. They see through all the work required in identifying the right product for a market and getting the product to succeed in that market.
Here, I have compiled 12 important things I did as a PM and I expect this will also be useful for you.
1. Understand the problem you are solving
Firstly, the only reason we are building a product is to solve a particular problem. Your users or potential users are faced with several problems but please understand that you cannot solve every existing problem. Hence, as a PM you have to look through your user’s eyes and determine the most important problem to solve. For instance, a user is finding it difficult to remember tasks to do.
2. Plan your research Interview your users and document your findings
Here, we come up with ways we will reach out to our users or potential users to hear from them. We need to see into the problems they are facing and also prepare the appropriate questions to ask so that we can get the best responses addressing their pain points. We should ask questions that will let us hear about similar products they have used before so as to deduce how much they enjoyed or disliked such product(s). This also helps with our market and competitive analysis.
Ok, we are now set to meet our users and ask them the questions we have curated. Make your interview participants so relaxed and free with you so that you can get very useful responses from them and also make them aware that you are recording their responses.
Alternatively, a user survey can be carried out at this stage.
Document every response you get as they will help you further.
3. Analyze and identify user pain points
We have our responses from users already and document them. and from here we come up with user pain points that help the PM to develop an empathy map, themes, and user persona.
4. Come up with solutions to the pain points
The PM provides ideas and opportunities that address the user pain points, these in turn help the PM to come up with: a problem statement, target market, user stories, acceptance criteria, user flows, and Product Requirement Document (PRD) that guides the designers and engineers on what to do.
5. Develop and prioritize features
From the solutions provided, the PM comes up with ‘’must-have’’ features for the products that will enable users to accomplish their goals. Also, the PM with other team members decides which features must be developed first for the minimum viable product (MVP). Using a feature prioritization framework, you should be able to list features that must be included in the MVP and the ones that will come up later.
6. Features backlog
Remember from feature prioritization we were able to decide on ‘’Must-have’’ features and these features are poured into the feature backlog. These are the features to be developed and the PM categorizes them into stages of accomplishment – the PM marks the features to be developed, the features that are under development, and the features that have been developed.
7. Sprint planning
We have the design sprint and development sprint.
In the design sprint, the PM allocates features to be designed. During the sprint planning stage, the team discusses how each feature will be accomplished in the sprint. As soon as the designers are coming up with hi-fi screens, the developers can start building and this happens consecutively. Sprint is a period, usually 2 weeks, in which some agreed set of developments take place so that users can get new improvements to the product. The sprint review and sprint retrospective come up afterward.
8. Fix stand-ups
Stand-ups are short meetings, usually done daily between the product team to discuss what has been done, what to do, progress that has been made, and clear blockers to getting a job done. This involves everyone on the team.
9. Create prototypes
This is a process of creating sample versions of a product so we can test our ideas and designs. The PM and product designers are actively involved in this stage. Firstly, a paper sketch of the ideas is done so we can have different options to choose from, this leads to the product designer coming up with user flows than the low-fidelity prototype which is the structure of the product is created so we can see what our product resembles as we then proceed to create the high fidelity prototypes that are so similar to the actual product.
10. Test the prototype:
At this stage, the prototypes created are tested which means conducting usability testing amongst potential users so they can interact with the interface to get bugs detected, and usability problems. Here, the PM and designers can record user interaction.
11. Get feedback from users and iterate
After users must have tested the prototypes, we get their responses and reactions to know bugs or issues discovered by users, and all of these help the PM and designers to go back to any of the stages to fix every issue and create a viable and usable product.
12. MVP release
After necessary iterations and bugs must have been fixed from the high-fidelity prototypes, the Minimum Viable Product is released to the market. An MVP is the first version of a product that contains enough features for the users. After the users interact with your MVP and you get feedback from them, you can infuse features and corrections into subsequent versions.
Now, this is what it takes and a usable product is ready.
