The Journal App Making Journal: Day 33

Product management processes and skills

What have I learned about app design and development today?

Took a break from coding today.

What have I learned about journaling products / technologies / users today?

More than specifically looking at journaling today, I learned about product development and management.

I downloaded the Udemy course on ‘Become a Product Manager’ a while ago, and started getting into it today. Loved the topic and the presentation.

It was put together by Cole Mercer from Soundcloud, and Evan Kimbrell from other entrepreneurship courses on Udemy.

It is interesting to learn,

• Product Manager roles are growing in demand.
• There are hardly any degrees on it, and it’s hard to Google a good definition about it. “The ambiguity of the product management role is near to its essence”.

• Product managers thrive on breadth of information, knowledge, and contacts, are often “jack of all trades”. Their role is a connector and enabler of all the pieces that bring a product to life. They are responsible for the ultimate success of the product, interact across and impact all facets of the business. It is also a key entrepreneurial skill.
• A product can be an entire product as everyday meaning of the word has it, eg. a mobile phone, or any aspect of a complex product, eg. the news feed or recommender algorithm aspect at Facebook or Medium.
• Product management and project management are fundamentally different. The former is about exploring, designing, and creating, while the latter is about goal getting, engineering, and problem solving. And product manager roles are served well by both skills.
• There are four phases of a product life cycle: Introduction (eg a new sleep tracker), Growth (eg. Snapchat), Maturity (eg. Twitter), and Decline (eg. Yahoo).
• There are seven stages of a product development process: Conceive, Plan, Develop, Iterate, Launch, Steady State, Maintain or Kill.
• “Lean” product development is a mindset. “Agile” software development is a “lean” project management philosophy. “Scrum” and “Kanban” are examples of the Agile philosophy’s implementation. One is more specific and strict about formats and constraints, the other is more flexible and flowing.

So masculine these words… I need to look up the dictionary for “scrum”, and even then I am not sure how it relates. But hey, no complaint, if it works some, it works for some.

And this journal definitely belongs in the product development stage of Conceive.

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