“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates

I may be a recent grad, but my first startup taught me a lot about building great products. Through my personal experience, hours of reading tech articles, and years of watching my sister build products at OpenTable, I’ve learned the basic principles of product management. Below I’ve outlined my constantly evolving PM process so that I can refer back to it as I take on new challenges. I’m sure it’s not perfect, so if you have anything to add, please feel free to comment below.

Research

Let’s start at the beginning: great products solve real problems.

[1] Customer understanding: Who are our customers? What are their pain points? Who is going to use this? What roles do they play? Why are they going ot use it?

[2] Qualitative/Quantitative Research: Gather and review surveys, interviews, segmentation studies, personas, and behavior-based research. Analyze the results and look for patterns.

[3] Personas: Develop a portrait of each type of customer we’re targeting — what matters to them?

[4] Competitive Analysis: Examine competing products and messaging. Look at the market for opportunities to differentiate.

[5] Objectives: Set goals based on the customer pain points and needs. What are our customer’s goals? Let’s create KPIs around that.

[6] Anticipate Challenges: Brainstorm some hypotheses around how things could go wrong.

Product Roadmap

Features don’t make great products, but we need to know what we’re building. The product roadmap paints a clear and compelling picture of where we’re going together.

[1] It helps inspire the team
[2] It holds us accountable
[3] It helps engineers build the product
[4] It helps the sales, support & marketing teams understand and communicate the vision of the product to customers

Prototyping

Basic prototyping allows us to present our idea to internal teams or customers, get feedback, and validate our assumptions.

Prototyping tools I like to use include post-it notes, basic sketches, InDesign, Proto.io, and Balsalmiq. These tools help us create a skeleton that we can revise and improve as we learn more.

Usability Testing

Let’s start testing the usability of our new product by asking good questions and validating our assumptions. Do our users understand how to use our product? Is it solving their problem? If not, why not?

Here’s how we’ll do it:

[1] Comparison: Maybe we have two choices that we want to decide between. Let’s let data drive our decision and test both options with an A/B testing tool like Optimizely.

[2] View usage: The best way to measure usability is to observe when and how users use our product. There are great tools out there that can help us achieve this. Let’s try using Mouseflow to capture usability on video and focus groups to walk users through several scenarios in-person.

For example, here’s a snippet from a usability script I used for my startup:

Scenario A

“Let’s suppose you are at a showcase tournament and you want to get college coaches to come watch your soccer game. Now say you had to use this app to share your profile with a college coach.

How would you find a college coach to send your profile to?

[Observe what they do, then ask these follow up questions…]

What are you looking for on this page?
What would you expect to happen if you did that?
What is helpful for you or interesting and what is not?”

Measuring Success

If solving problems is the goal of new product development, then gathering feedback and measuring success is the single most important component of product management. How are we going to do this? Let’s check in with key stakeholders to make sure we’re doing what we set out to do. We might use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or good-ol-fashion emails, phone calls, and interviews.

Checkpoints: Day 1, day 7, week 4, month 3, month 6.

Example metrics: How many/what % have…

[1] Downloaded
[2] Set up dashboard
[3] Viewed dashboard
[4] Interacted dashboard
[5] Returned/repeated use

Key Questions:

[1] Has this product improved x,y,z for you?
[2] What do you like about this product?
[3] What do you not like about this product?

Final Thoughts…

Great people make great products. It’s important to tell a clear and compelling story about what we are building. Not everyone has to be excited, but everyone does need to know what we’re building and why it’s important. Great product managers identify problems, think creatively, communicate clearly, persevere, and know how to rally people around a shared vision. Building amazing products is hard work, but there’s nothing better than seeing your work truly make a difference in the lives of your customers.