Introduction to Product Management

B2B - Enterprise - Integrated Product Design - Product Management Course - Digital SaaS - Introduction - Manager
Introduction to
Product
Management

mcoach
Product Excellence. Simpliﬁed

About us
At mcoach we are passionate about helping startups, enterprises build great SaaS
products that make people’s lives easier.
Winning Digital Products require the perfect blend of discovery, deﬁnition and
delivery. Integrating customer obsession and continuous improvement requires an
empathetic, agile and lean thinking.
Converting ambiguity into a tangible plan requires a constant divergence and
convergence. Conscious design thinking in every aspect of product development
requires an well integrated cross functional team of designers, developers and
business executives.

Skills & expertise
problem
framing
Human
experience
Problem
Solving
Product
Design

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Very few things unite us as global
citizens. Unhappiness tops the list.
We humans believe that the route to
contentment, comfort, satiety, warmth,
peace and happiness passes through
right choices, decisions and experiences.

According to psychologists, Seeking new,
making progress, getting recognized are
self therapies we seek to overcome
inabilities and discontentment.
Are you wondering “Why are we talking
psychology ?”

A product is a mechanism to transfer
visionary eﬃciencies to other people and
help them overcome constraints
impeding progress.
A product is a bundle of distinct
experiences a customer would like to
ideally have in a speciﬁc context as they
go about with their lives.

A product is a tool to connect human
beings and facilitate progress in their
lives.
It is an intermediary between the people
who create it and the people who
consume it.

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A product represents diﬀerent things to
diﬀerent groups of individuals.
1. As a user, you look at it as a bundle of
change,
2. As a buyer you look at it as a bundle of
value,

3. As a decider you look at it as a bundle of
outcomes,
4. As a visionary you look at it as a bundle
of opportunity,
5. As an technologist you look at it as
innovative engineering,
6. As a Designer you look at it as an ideal
solution,

7. As a marketer you look at it as a bundle of
benefits,
8. As a investor, you look at it as a bundle of
profits,
Each of these stakeholders are looking to
fulfill the objectives of their job

1. We build products to make each of these
stakeholders progress in their Lives
2. We build products to broadbase
capability and democratize outcomes.
3. We build products to maximize beneﬁts
and minimize errors.
4. We build products to fulﬁll the expectations
of these stakeholders dependents.

5. We build products because the alternate
is an untenable situation that deteriorates
our quality of life.
6. We build products because we see a
signiﬁcant group of people are clueless in
the face of a debilitating impediment.

7. We build products because we are able to
anticipate something based on scientiﬁc
insights and creative instincts.
“Our job is to ﬁgure out what customers are
going to want before they do.” - Steve Jobs.

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World is ﬁlled with only 2 kinds of people.
Proactives and Reactives.
Reactives are those who care because they
need to. Proactives are those who care
because they want to.

As a customer you are deﬁned by the need.
It’s ok to be reactive.
As a creator you are deﬁned by the want. Be
Proactive.

We build products to satiate the needs of
our customer’s (decider and user).
We don’t build products to satisfy our
stakeholders (investors, employees).

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“We start with a customer need and work
backwards” - said Jeﬀ Bezos of Amazon.
Successful products are made by integrated
teams with a sole mission to please
particular types of people with same needs.

To fulﬁll their needs in exclusion of
everything else. Ultra successful companies
like Amazon call it as customer obsession,
Customer Obsession is the Science and Art
of being proactive with your customer.
Anticipating their needs and innovating on
their behalf.

Customer obsession is about tireless
listening to their verbal and non verbal
feedback.
Customer obsession is about grasping their
unpredictable behavior.

Customer obsession is about identifying
outlier patterns within populations.
Customer obsession is about anticipating
and eradicating friction in their process,
tasks, activities.

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There are many ways for an organization to
ﬂourish.
You can be very successful company by
being product obsessed, competitor
obsessed, technology obsessed, business
model obsessed and market obsessed.

Any of the above methods can help you
achieve your business goals.
Customer Obsession empowers you to
reach market leadership in a healthier way.

Customer Obsession Prepares you to adapt
against constantly changing needs, wants
and expectations.
Customer Obsession propagates the
attitude, structure and processes to invent
and pioneer on behalf of the customer.

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So
close that you tell them what they need well
before they realize it themselves.” - Steve
Jobs,
All companies claim to be customer
obsessed. Reality is diﬀerent. Aspiration is
good. Sustained customer centric action is
the only way to a higher share of revenues.

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A mindset that is attuned to always deliver
deliver disproportionate value to the
customer
An attitude that goes beyond the obvious,
anticipates expectations and sets customer
delight as the pursuit.

A leadership that measures performance
based on strengths of relationships as
indicated by customer engagement,
customer retention, customer advocacy and
customer churn.
A culture of leveraging persistent user
research and user feedback to gather
insights and develop new ideas for the
customer.

A knowledge base that accumulates the
minutest of customer details into customer
maps so as to grasp the full customer
journey.
A process that is instituted to pursue
sustained Listening, ruthless
Experimentation, rigorous Invention and
Continuous Validation.

A team that is comfortable with change,
nimble in its structure and is organized to
adapt to customer evolution.
An Operation that is capable of collecting full
spectrum customer interaction data, armed with
tools to analyze strategic and tactical
perspectives and a decision making pipeline that
prioritizes these insights across the
organization.

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Addressing real buyer pain points, is the
only way to develop products customers
love.
This is possible only when we can infuse
customer voice at every step of the product
development process.

In fact, companies like amazon go to the
extent of having an empty chair reserved for
customers in meetings as they seek to
imbibe customer consciousness among
product leaders.
A Product Manager holds forte as the voice
of the customer.

Unbiased advocate of the customer needs
based on diﬀerent types of User Research.
Leverages insights from Qualitative,
Quantitative and Behavioral methods to
grasp customer context. Combines inquiry
with observation to unearth the underlying
pain.

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Getting to know your users is a never
ending task.
It is the only activity that lasts the whole
cycle of discovery, deﬁnition, development
and Delivery.

Structuring a mechanism to collect,
organize and act on feedback. Ability to
distinguish signal from noise is a key skill
for Product Managers.
Product Managers rely on insights from
design research studies like contextual
inquiry, market research like surveys,
customer feedback through support centers,

customer engagement through web analytics
and embedded software usage analytics from
the product to inform product management
decisions.
Uses these information to Identify and
Validate the strategic priority of needs.

Categorizes them tactically along unworkable,
unavoidable, urgent and underserved buckets
so as to ﬁgure out the desirability.
Funnel that knowledge to remove status quo
and establish a new normal by building a new
product or improving an existing product.

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Product Manager are keen to get to detailed
analysis of the decision making process.
They break down the customer monolith
into its constituent parts. They are sensitive
to the idea of Decision Making Unit of
customers.

They grasp various customer roles of
Inﬂuencer, Decider, Buyers and Users to
gain a better perspective.
Product managers ask a lot of questions
wherein they seek to narrow down the
common denominator of shared interest
with customer DMU’s.

What ratio of eﬀort should go into
researching the diﬀerent types?
What point in the development process
should i focus on knowing users?

What changes do we require in order to
accommodate new need groups?
what are our core customer segments?
What pain points each segment have?

What features would alleviate pain points?
Is the feature desirable to the customer
team?
What changes do we require in order to
accommodate new need groups?

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A Product Manager is a key role in a
company. Some industry leaders also refer
to them as the CEO of the product.
They are accountable for building the right
product and delivering the product right. For
both eﬀectiveness and eﬃciency.

In the process they are also responsible for
the vision, strategy, roadmap, and feature
deﬁnition of the product or portfolio.
Depending on size of the company, stage of
its growth, maturity of the product, business
model and organizational structure the roles
and responsibilities of PM vary dramatically

A Product Manager is the hub of a wheel that
holds the internal organization together. A
People Person.
He is obsessed with assembling best teams,
evangelizing their needs and empowering
them with resources to excel in their spheres.

Every organization is structured diﬀerently.
Functional, program oriented, and Skill
driven teams are typical examples.
Irrespective of how they are organized, each
individual operates with personal and
professional goals tied to their context.

Brimming with ideas, suggestions, requests
and complaints, they seek to and need to
have a say in how products are built.
A product manager gets to interact with
legal, sales, marketing, industry analysts,
business development, technology, CXO’s,
data analysts, user researchers,

user experience designers, security experts,
customer success, customer support and
ﬁnance on various disciplines that will
impact the product launch.
A product manager compiles, consolidates
and cross pollinates ideas from all
disciplines of the organization.

As a master facilitator, product manager
brings together ideas from various
stakeholders and disciplines. possess the
capability to
1. Bring together customers, partners to
pursue a shared objective
2. Works backwards from impact to the
product epics, stories and features

3. review technical and marketing content
for relevance to the audience.
4. Acquires competitive intelligence
leveraging all types of research
5. Gathers, assembles and presents
information to support business case

As a general manager of the product, he is
expected to assemble the right team and
empower them with frameworks, models,
process, tools and techniques.
1. Being thoughtful about the purpose to
change.
2. Selecting the type of environment
(startup, enterprise, remote) you wish to
operate

3. Being conscious of the unique perspective
you bring to the role in a b2b or b2c
4. Acquiring the skills needed, tapping into
the larger network of experts and mentors.
5. Demonstrating curiosity to learn diﬀerent
work needs
6. Being articulate about your opinions and
sharing best practices.

As a Problem Solver, you are expected to
spend time thinking through the problem
and then convert them into a problem
hypothesis statement that resonates with
the wider organization.
1. People are driven by instincts, insights,
prospects or competitors in the identiﬁcation
of solutions.

First case we call visionaries, the second
case we call innovators, the third case we
call purposeful and the fourth we call
imitators.
2. Real solutions to customers problems
happen when a product manager brings
together all the traits and apply them in a
unique composition to the speciﬁc scenario at
hand.

3. Blended thought process is the source of
eﬀective problem deﬁnition. This is possible
only when product managers can overcome
their years of learning and training in
structured problem solving.
4. Being comfortable solving ill structured
problems that have little or no precedence
is the hallmark of great product managers.

5. For most of the time, a product manager is
in a constant state of uncertainty listening to
evolving customer needs, stakeholder
expectations, competitor moves and
generating options.
Irrespective of what you do on a day to day
basis, The Heart Of Product Management Is
Finding and Solving Problems.

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Day in the life of a Product Manager entails
many things depending on the growth of
organization.
You might be managing existing product or
portfolio, You might be working to improve
revenue via an optimal pricing strategy.

You might be tasked to Provide realistic
customer acquisition forecast. You might be
working with design and business teams to
create presentations & data sheets.
Some of the common day to day activities
are
1. Catch up on Team, Stakeholder and
Customer Communication via all channels.

2. Setup calls with existing customers to
understand their experience and ﬁnd ways
to improve it.
3. Orient yourself to learn about market
knowledge, insights and thought leadership.

4. Evaluate product against market needs
and explore new themes for enhancing
customer delight.
5. Provide inputs to construct an ideal
customer proﬁle and persona

6. Keep oneself organized to attend to cross
functional meetings requests
7. Respond to support team requests for
validating customer problems or review
escalations

8. Updating Fellow PM’s about what’s
happening in your team and take counsel
on improvement
9. Preparing for Product Review meetings
with stakeholders to discuss performance.

10. Keeping tab of Project Management
Deliverables via Task Tracking Software
11. Testing internal releases of product for
edge test cases and user experience ﬂaws.

12. Joining Stand up meetings with cross
functional stakeholders to grasp asks and
mitigate blocks
13. Working with usability testing teams to
review new prototypes or product features.

14. Organizing scrum stand up meetings for
agile delivery teams with Product Owners.
15. Managing Product Backlogs and
Prioritizing features that accelerate customer
impact

16. Working with legal teams to mitigate any
risk of lawsuits with product launch.
17. Developing Product Requirements
documents detailing the various constraints
of feature operation

18. Develop or Review Content collaterals to
communicate product beneﬁts.
19. Reviewing and Enhancing Press Release
to support feature launches

20. Identify opportunities, Validate
necessity, align stakeholders and convince
decision makers to invest in the opportunity.
21. Inspire, motivate, inﬂuence and coach
cross functional peers to make decisions in
the best interests of the customers.

22. Take ownership of a lot of dirty work so
that everyone in the team is unblocked to
perform his job.
23. Use the product like an expert user to
grasp the friction and work with engineering
to proactively resolve it

24. Set expectations and establish workﬂow
with teams for delegation and decision
making
25. Attends learning and networking events
with the single purpose to improve
customers lives by grasping their reality,
constraints and experiences

26. Oﬀers continuous customer orientation
trainings for design, technology and
business functions to propagate and
assimilate customer insights.
27. Brings together key members of the
team, facilitates in depth conversations,
identiﬁes decision alternatives that have
most positive impact on stakeholders.

28. Works with marketing and sales teams
to improve win ratios by optimizing
qualiﬁcation and conversion metrics based
on evolving grasp of customer persona.
29. Keeps a tab on product operational
metrics includings ﬁnancial results on a
regular basis to quantify the output and
outcomes

30. employ the right analytics tools to
access relevant data and enlist the support
of data scientists for deeper analytics
31. snap screenshots and sketch wireframes
for feature ideas that I had talked about
with a designer

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What are the skills required of a Product
Manager ?
1. Listening
2. Communication

3. Inﬂuence
4. Presentation
5. Organization
6. Data analysis

7. Strategic thinking
8. Persuasion
9. Innovation
10. Creativity

11. Product insight
12. Estimation
13. Market Knowledge
14. Emotional intelligence

15. Empathy
16. Active listening
17. Critical thinking
18. Structured thinking

19. Design thinking
20. Problem ﬁnding
21. Problem solving
22. Experimentation

23. Collaboration
24. Communication
25. Decision making
26. Business acumen.

Product
Manager
channels
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mcoach

Personalized
Product
Mentoring
Transition into Rockstar PM

Contact
mcoach
mohammed@mcoach,in
www.mcoach.in

Introduction to Product Management

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