Learning Product Management
I started a course on product management yesterday, Thursday, October 28th, 2021. I am not a writer, but I am trying to learn, so I decided that while I take the product management course, I would also learn to be a better writer. As I learn, I will document what I am learning, hopefully, this will make me learn and write better. You can call it killing two birds with one stone. lol.
Anyways, let's get into this. The course I’m taking is Digital Product Management by the University of Virginia on Coursera. The tutor, Alex Cowan, started by explaining the roles of a Product Manager. He talked about how one of the hardest and most important things about being a successful Product Manager is creating focus.
He went further to explain focus as identifying, testing, and validating product-market fit; what you are doing for your customers versus what you are not. Taking these findings and translating them into productive healthy interfaces with your interdisciplinary collaborators to achieve market growth.
He went ahead to say that all good product managers follow this Venn diagram (as seen in the image above). Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability — the product manager is at the center.
Desirability: This can also be a product-market fit (PMF) — which loosely translates to “does the customer want it? ”. Achieving this determines if your product is relevant or not.
Feasibility: Can the product be built? What would it take to build an optimized version of the product idea?
Viability: Can you make money off this product?
He further explains that Desirability is the most important of the three (3), having a relationship with your customer, knowing what your customer wants in regards to the product you are building. Knowing your PMFs and then creating a healthy business model around them with your collaborators is central to successful product management. He talked about how product management is all about creating FOCUS and translating it into something that is actionable for a lot of different collaborators. It is at the intersection of user experience, technology, and business.
How to Create Desirability
It is important that a product manager focuses on desirability. It would either make or break your product. To do that, go to your customer and create a testable focus around who they are, and what is really important to them, and then work to translate that focus into something that is actionable in these different areas (feasibility and viability). Knowing what is important and what can be dispensed with would reduce the overwhelming impact of the job.
Product Management == Desirability, Feasibility, Viability.
As a product manager, you should always know what is on your customer’s A-list. Not in terms of the product that you have right now, but in terms of the experience you are trying to create around the product.
The last thing I learned was, a product is never a product. A product is a solution. It is something that provides an experience to the customer. Agile is the best way to provide that solution to your customers. A method where you iterate through several versions of the product, ideally with a minimum amount of cost and time until you make sure that you are hitting the right mark on the dimension of desirability. Desirability is that dependent variable, finding the right problem, identifying it, and then iterating through to the right solution.
