Winning products come from a deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just now possible.
Technology and Business Intersection
Nine out of every ten products launched fail because they do not achieve their sales goals, and in many cases, this happens because of the lack of a proper product management process and a professional to manage it.
The product manager has a mission to solve the problems of consumers, and therefore, they need to know who the target audience of the product is, what their problems and challenges are, and be smart enough to propose real solutions.
To hire a good product manager, a good place to start the hunt is within the company itself. Your future product manager can be in any department.
PM Must Incessantly Look For New Opportunities
To understand how to best exploit these opportunities, you need to use a list of questions proposed by Cagan.
The key issues are:
- What problem will this opportunity solve?
- Who is affected by the problem and how big is this market?
- What alternatives do competitors offer?
- Why can we succeed in this?
Only after finding a product opportunity to pursue should a PM initiate product discovery.
Discovering A Product
To create a good product, engineers need to build it, consumers must use it, and the product must be valuable for consumers to buy.
To prove this, the PM must use a navigable prototype that offers a minimally realistic user experience so that users can test it. Involving engineers is also essential to decide which elements to have, also to know if the product is technically executable.
Finding The Right Team
The PM needs a productive team around to achieve this:
- Designers and Users Experience Professionals should focus on creating the product interface for the ultimate consumer.
- Software engineers must develop the product that the manager has defined.
- The Product Marketer, this person, and the product manager must support each other to formulate marketing messages about the product together.
User Experience Must Come First
The PM must work intensively with a design team:
The interaction designer works to understand the requirements and way of thinking of the target audience, and creates a prototype, also called a wireframe, based on this understanding.
The visual designer contributes the visual interface, applied to the skeleton. Essentially, these two roles create the entire user experience, making them key components of the product team.
Finally, it is necessary to test the product with users through usability tests and generate ideas for more iterations of the design process.
