April 18

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Published May 2016 on You Tube by the Warton School 

 
 

Video " Art of Product Management" with Sachin Rekhi. 

Key Takes: In the product management context, according to Sachin, the business plan is replaced by a two page product marketing fit/ hypothesis document.

Jeff Besos, requires a 6 page written document when a idea is being presented to him during a meeting. The act of writing helps the presenter think through their proposal.

Product Managers  - “ Drive the vision strategy design and execution of their products”

This depends on your scope.

60% of your time need to be spent on execution.

Strategy is irrelevant if you are not converting your ideas to products.

"You have to constantly be calibrating, are you pointing the team in the right direction" - Iterative process of define, validate and iterate.

To speed up the interaction process,. the decision making stakeholders should be clearly defined. Ideally its a small group of people.

Product managers are often the ones that help coordinate issues within the process. "You are the curator of great ideas", "great ideas come from everywhere on the team. You  need to drive to the top the very best ideas - which would could come from all stakeholders.

Feature Creep - "Feature creep or scope creep is what happens when a project (usually software) spirals out of control and starts to have features added to it that were not intended , were not in the original design, or were not paid for." - Urban Dictionary.

How you control that is to tie the features specifically for your personas.

 

Video 2: "What Are the Basics of a Product Manager Role by Google PM"

The Product Manager controls the what and why of a product development.

.e., what are the problems we are solving and how are we to solve those problem.

 

Product Company Organogram Hierarchy: VP of Product - > Head of Product -> Senior Product Manager -> Junior Product Manager.

 

Your job at the PM is to control the roadmap.

Potential Inputs  for the Roadmap:

- Vision and Strategy - that comes in from the people above you,

- Market Research, what are the competitors doing?

- Customer User Research

- Analytics ( the hard data)

- XFN: BD, Marketing, Sales , Legal

- Your / Team understanding

 

VIDEO 3 -  Cracking the PM Interview by Gale Mcdowell

Associate Product Manager Role  - Can be considered as an entry level PM role.

As a PM,. you can influence the developers, but you do not necessarily have authority over them.

"People make assumptions based on your background"

Required skills for the perfect PM - Leadership & Execution - Technical / Product ( Best Practices) / Business / Industry ( Field Insights). Training on weak areas should be considered  and the candidate profile should frame skills not apparent in their career background that relate to PM.