The Tell-tale Sign of Great Product Management

WIP Alert This is a work in progress. Current information is correct but more content may be added in the future.

The tell-tale sign of great product management is that it seems to read your mind.

Picture an app or digital product you use all the time.

It mostly works well but there's this small annoying thing which bugs you all the time. You don't get redirected after concluding an action; you need to TODO FINISH

Then, you open the app the next day and the app is now working exacly the way

This isn't by accident — this is the work of PMs behind the scenes, who somehow found out that this specific issue was affecting users (including you).

This process is the essence of PM'ing and it includes, among other points:

• User research
• Data analysis
• Negotiation + Prioritization
• Project management
• Experimentation + Testing
• Rollout
• Monitoring

User research and data analysis

mention things like interviews and collection of feedbacks but also directed data analysis such as funnel analysis and process mining

Prioritization and Execution

this is where the PM argues why this specific issue should be solved before the N other things on the roadmap

then, the execution is where the actual engineering effort takes place

Experimentation and testing

New features are never rolled out to all customers all at once. This would be too risky, especially for larger, established firms.

Instead, companies usually enable enhancements to a small portion of customers¹ so they can see the impacts on a smaller scale before making the new feature available to the general audience.

Two common rollout patterns are:

• A/B testing where the new feature is enabled for a random percentage of the customer base. This enables unbiased analyses and mitigates risk in case something unexpected happens.

• Early acess users are customers who volunteer to test out new features. They agree to provide feedback, for a chance to have a say in how features are developed.

During testing, the team usually checks for problems such as:

• Increased number of support tickets;
• Higher level of system errors or latency;
• Statistically significant worsening of CSAT metrics.

Rollout and steady-state monitoring

Rollout to an increasingly larger proportion of customers. Important because this enables graceful scaling of cloud-based systems and services that are involved in the new feature.

Then, BAU monitoring

Re: Faster horses

yes I know.. but this doesn't negate the previous points

it's perfectly possible for PMs to fix a problem and or mitigate an annoyance in a way different from what you expected.

1: At a system level, this is usually done with Feature flags.