The Product Portfolio Matrix
While taking an interview for a product manager earlier this year, I was asked by the interviewee — “Will I work on the customer app or not?”. I answered — “Yes, you may, but you may also need to do work on some backend product”. He said — “I would not be interested in that”.
Generally product management’s glamour is associated with the consumer facing products. This is mainly because of their high visibility and their connect with the end user. They pose many interesting challenges to the product manager but that’s just tip of the iceberg.
There are many more intriguing problems that product gets to solve in areas which are never seen by the end consumer. There are various aspects of UX that are never seen by the user directly.
A good UX decision is as much about what one decides not to show the user as much it is about what the user finally consumes and interacts with.
To explain this further, let’s look at the product portfolio matrix from perspective of 3 very common consumer products — Uber, Amazon and Inbox by Google.
[Disclaimer — I have not worked at these places, and the analysis is personal]
The x axis represents the product visibility to end user — the left represents low/no visibility while the right represents high visibility to the end user of the service. The y axis represent backend or front end product.
The four quadrants are thus represented as:
- Quadrant A — The Red Carpet Quadrant
- Quadrant B — The Plumber’s Quadrant
- Quadrant C — The Magic Potion Quadrant
- Quadrant D — The Instant Gratification Quadrant
Each quadrant has it’s own challenges, requirements and ways of building the right product for. Even the customer for these quadrants are different with distinct needs. The product manager needs to get into shoes of those specific customers while solving problems for the specific quadrant.
There will be trailing blog posts talking about these in detail.
