What is product management?

As you may already know by now if you’ve been reading our blog, I’ve been going everywhere in the tech community & events of Toronto since I reached Canada a few months ago. One of the few things I hadn’t though was attending tech workshops. Toronto’s tech scene is pretty famous for having numerous workshops handled by digital schools and bootcamps. The ones I’ve heard about most are Brain Station, HackerYou, Lighthouse Labs, and Bitmaker.

Bitmaker are awesome in the sense that every week they do free workshops to introduce to certain themes and tech jobs: UX/UI, Product Management, Coding HTML & CSS, Digital Marketing.

I took this week the intro to Product Management, and not only have I learned a lot about this exciting job position, but It has also made me realize how much it is what I’ve been loving the most doing in my past startup projects: working with developers, designers, building product, managing team, experimenting, asking user’s feedback and keep improving the product.

Reaching Bitmaker offices in Toronto

Located in downtown Toronto, is where the new office of Bitmaker is. It was pretty well organized. When I reached they welcomed all participants, made us check-in and gave us a few papers : one for the exercise workshop and the other one for feedback about the course.

The room is pretty neat. Very startup vibe and tech atmosphere: wheel chairs, bright light, couches everywhere. Yep, feels like I’m at the right place for this lesson about Product Management.

Participants meet each other and talk about why they are here. It’s pretty interesting because most of them have very different backgrounds, and not especially tech related. They all want to learn more about Product Management, maybe follow the full time course at Bitmaker as well, and be able to get their first job in tech industry. I like knowing the fact that people are getting more interested to shift towards tech nowadays in terms of career.

So what is product management?

Our product management teacher introduces himself. His name is Quadri Oshibotu. Like many people who were in high school, he wasn’t sure what to do as a career. He did a business school and thought he’d figure out. But he didn’t.

He then found his first job for a startup part of the DMZ. The DMZ is the largest startup incubator in North America and #3 worldwide. I had the great opportunity to go take a look at their offices a few months ago in Toronto.

So Quadri was introduced to this startup which was a development studio making games, apps and websites. He was asked to become their first full time employee and product manager. He was quite hesitant at first.

“Should I go for a comfortable job in a big company? I thought why not try the startup and see how it goes.”

And he did a good choice. The startup became succesfull and made great apps which appeared in NY Times magazine, TechCrunch, etc.

Since then, Quadri has worked for several companies as a product manager, which made him have a great knowledge about the profession and he is now giving courses to students.

So what is a product manager and what does he do? Following Quadri:

A product manager is a generalist who knows a bit of everything (engineering, UX & UI, product marketing) and works with the specialists who know everything withing their domain (developpers, designers, etc.)

So you kind of have that managing aspect of your role, working with teams and supervising them. But a product manager isn’t above everyone. It is not an exec role. You are same level as developers, etc and can’t fire anyone of your team.

Also Quadri told us as a Product Manager you are at the intersection of these 3 things: customer, technology, business.

Quadri was also often repeating during his class a pretty cool mantra:

“Who is the champion of customers? Product Managers!”

It is essential for product managers to know what the customers want, and how they want it.

As following the graphic below, you can see the different roles of each team members in product development, and what product managers are essentially focused on: customers.

So to summarize what the product manager’s goal is:

“To find the right product that needs to be built to serve customer needs”

A product manager supervizes a team of developers, designers, etc. Everyone involved for the product development. And his goal is to make sure the product fits to the customer’s needs and reaches success with them. This is why it is really important for a product manager to always collect feedback from it’s users or customers and question them about what is good or bad with the product, so that he can improve it.

So, a product manager is constantly trying to source problems and ideas for the product. How do you source problems?

It is obvious for a product manager to be using his product daily. He has to be like a user, and the more time he spends with it, the easier it will be to detect a problem within the product. What is bothering me? Was this bug there yesterday? This is referred as “dogfooding”.

Also there are plenty of other ways to source problems:

Observing users in the field: GO SEE YOUR USERS! Now this is something that I appreciated seeing in the lesson. As a product creator myself, I always like asking my users what they like about it and what should be improved. This is something that has helped many startups, and for some become billion dollar startups like AirBnB. For example at the time when AirBnB was struggling in their debuts, they got recommended from YC to go see their users right face to face, in New York (where the majority of their users came from). So they went there and collected really usefull feedback, thus to detect the problems and improve the product (ex: making professional photographs for AirBnB hosts).

Analyze support tickets: Thanks to the magic of social media nowadays, you can interact with your customers directly, and collect their feedback. Having a twitter support is a great tool for product managers. Slack for example have a great twitter support and don’t hesitate to interact with their users having issues using the platform. Also you can add a support button on your app or website. In this case you would have direct recommendations from users using it live.

Understand industry trends: Last but not least, analyzing industry trends is very important to know what your product should be like and what other products your users use as alternative to yours. Some tools such as Product Hunt and Beta List are great for that. And you can also chat with your users through an official Slack channel of your company or by talking with them through Linkedin groups.

What does a product manager’s route look like? (Conclusion)

Okay now here’s the best graph to summarize you what a product manager has to do.

For example, let’s look at that exercise we did during the workshop:

We are now product managers at Uber (sorry for those who were offended by the recent Uber stories in the news. But this is just for a quick example). We have meeting with all product managers and the board of Uber. The question of the board is : “Can we make a Uber for kids?”

So all product managers start brainstorming. The goal here is to find all problems related to that product. Can we make it? Could it be succesfull? Or could it easily fail because of too many problems related to it? That’s what a product manager has to ask himself.

With the participants we defined really good problems related to Uber for kids:

Security : how secure can it be to let a child go in a stranger’s car? Only one kidnap story and whole Uber could go in big drama (again).

Who are the users? : Here there are 3 users: the parents paying the uber through the app, the kids and the driver. You got to make not one user happy with the experience, but 3. Which can be quite challenging.

Payment and legal conditions

What if the kid pukes in the car or starts damaging it? Do the parents have to pay and how much?

Would there be two apps (Uber & Uber for kids) or all options united in the same app?

How can he parents be assured the kids reaches safely and in time (ex : for school)?

Would the schools allow their students to come with stranger’s car?

etc.

That was an interesting exercise to define all the problems. We also tried to measure the chances of success. And after voting 99% of the participants in the room decided we would preferably not developp that app because it would bring too much problems for Uber and have small gains in return.

But what if we actually decided to make it? Then we would follow the product manager’s roadmap: define all problems, prioritize it (what problem is most important for the company to be resolved?), design the solution (make a prototype, experiment it), build it, beta it then ship and measure success.