Product Development in 10 Steps by former Facebook PM
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Main takeaways: - A to Z all aspects of product development - Proven methodologies and strategies in developing a product - Cross-functional collaboration: teamwork, organization, and communication - Pre and post launch initiatives: research, planning, measurement, and more
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Product Development in 10 Steps by former Facebook PM
- 1. www.productschool.com Product Development in 10 Steps by former Facebook PM
- 2. Join 35,000+Product Managers on Free Resources Discover great job opportunities Job Portal prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack
- 3. C O U R S E S Product Management Learn the skills you need to land a Product Manager job
- 4. C O U R S E S Coding for Managers Build a website and gain the technical knowledge to lead software engineers
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- 7. C O U R S E S UX Design for Managers Gain a deeper understanding of your users and deliver an exceptional end-to- end experience
- 8. C O U R S E S For experienced Product Managers looking to gain strategic skills needed for top leadership roles Product Leadership
- 9. C O U R S E S Corporate Training Level up your team’s Product Management skills
- 10. Valentine Aseyo T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R
- 11. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN 10 STEPS Valentine Aseyo
- 12. # Orchestra photo Throughout the presentation, find instruments with same initial as the phase
- 15. To multitask or not to multitask….
- 16. #0: IDEATION
- 17. #1: RESEARCH
- 18. #2: PLANNING
- 21. #3: DESIGN
- 22. #4: FEEDBACK
- 23. #5: STRATEGY
- 24. #6: MEASUREMENT
- 25. #7: PRODUCTION
- 26. #8: TESTING
- 27. #9: LAUNCH
- 28. #10: POST-LAUNCH
- 29. STANDING OVATION
- 30. 1:1 COACHING
- 31. INTERVIEW SKILLS TRAINING ● Resume ○ Review, revamp, or rewrite ● Background Development ○ Elevator pitch, personal impact statement, professional experience ● Interviewing Tips ○ Language, brevity, prep, focus areas, asking the right questions, etc. ● Question Types ○ Critical-thinking, problem-solving, analytical/data, situational/behavioral, soft skills, etc. ● Mock Interview ○ Catered specifically for the companies/jobs applied for ● Project Development ○ For the last round of interviews where candidate is asked to develop and present a project Valentine Aseyo
- 32. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management, Coding, Data Analytics, Digital Marketing, UX Design, Product Leadership courses and Corporate Training
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- Hi everyone! Welcome to my TED Talk: Product Development in 10 Steps by Valentine Aseyo
- A conductor once said: “My orchestra plays the instruments. And I play them”. This couldn’t be more true for a Product Manager. It takes a village to build a product. Even a small feature development will often involve many cross-functional teams or people with different roles: data, engineering, design, back-end/front-end, DevOps. Maybe Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and many more.
- As a Product Manager, your role is to be the glue that holds all the pieces together making sure everything works like a well-oiled machine. This is not an easy task. You have to be incredibly organized and communicate very often. You have to have a strong vision, expertise, and ability to lead people. You are the conductor of this orchestra so people will look up to you for direction. How many of you have seen a live symphony? In a symphony, there are dozens of instruments playing different notes at the same time. Similarly, in Product Management, there will be many moving pieces progressing at the same time and many people doing different things at the same time. So it’s important to follow a solid step-by-step methodology. Are you ready to hear more about it? Cool! Before we get started let’s take a minute to talk about my favorite topic: ME!
- I’m Valentine - I’m Turkish/Spanish if you can’t tell by the accent or the charm :) I’m an Executive Coach. After working at several multinational tech companies for 12 years, I’ve decided to follow my passion and coach people. I cover every aspect of the business from A to Z and one of my strong suits is interview skills training. If you’re looking for a job and need help to prep for the interviews, you can reach out to me via Linkedin. (shameless plug) My last role was SVP of Product at Bandsintown, a concert discovery platform that curates a personalized list of live music events based on your specific taste. Before Bandsintown, I spent close to 8 years working at Facebook in Ireland, India, and US spanning many different roles Prior to that, Colgate & Palmolive and IBM Let me tell you an anecdote...
- Raise your hand if you think you’re good at multitasking. (You may say I wish I didn’t make myself known in just a second. Ha!) As I mentioned before, I’m an Executive Coach and train my clients on interviewing skills. Whenever I see multitasking on a resume, I tell them to delete it immediately because it’s not something to be proud of. There’s endless research proving that multitasking lowers efficiency, effectiveness, and quality. Also, according to data, majority of the people who think they can multitask, apparently cannot. I know you’re a bunch of super smart adults who can listen and read slides at the same time but hey, the data says most of you actually can’t and the ones who can will have lower comprehension and retention. So today I will optimize my presentation for impact and have a series of blank slides. You think I’m joking but I’m not. If you’d like to get the transcript of today’s presentation and the detailed descriptions of each step, please shoot me a quick message on Linkedin and I’ll gladly send it over to you. Okay, shall we get started? Cool, I want this to be an interactive session so please ask if anything is not clear. If you have any general questions, save it to the end.
- Of course, everything starts with Phase Zero: Ideation! First, you need to have an idea, an opportunity, or a business problem to work on. You may spot an opportunity to improve your product or build a brand new one You may unearth a problem through data, user feedback, or customer service insights. Brainstorming sessions are essential to the ideation phase because teamwork always trumps a singular mind and collective intelligence is golden. For example, if you’re solving a problem users face in the Help Center, you probably want to involve User Support Team sooner rather than later to get their thoughts and insights. Determine your audience and all parties impacted early on and make sure to involve them starting from phase zero.
- The important thing to remember is while you may think you already have a solution, you merely have a hypothesis. It needs to be tested before you proceed to building it. You need to collect as many data points as possible through a variety of methods: Market research: are you the first to come up with this idea or attempt to solve this problem? Probably not! Start with researching what has been done in this area, learn from others’ mistakes and experiences, find external data points, studies, research papers, and stats. Competitive analysis: take a look at what your competitors are doing. I’m not telling you to copy them, however, you need to do this analysis to be different and even superior. Look at how your target audience is engaging with their product and beat them at their game. I always say: “ you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to have a better one” Focus groups: do you know the best way to know what your customers want? Ask them! Empathy is a must-have quality for a PM. Focus groups will help you put yourself in your customers’ shoes. This doesn’t need to be conducted in a group setting where you watch people behind a mirrored glass. You can simply ask questions in a very informal manner. You should also interview your colleagues. For example, you should definitely sync with the Sales team that sell your product or the Customer Support team that is the bridge between you and your customers. Internal data: if you have any users at all, then you have data. Look at how your customers are engaging with your product or service, see where the pain points are, and monitor any drop, churn, or weirdness in data. Without data, you don’t have anything to base your decisions on.
- This is the phase where you start putting together a business plan. You need to outline all the details such as branding, pricing, budget, resources needed, requirements/dependencies, and many more. In order to do that, you start the broader communication with all the impacted stakeholders. For example, you may need to get in a room with your Product Marketing team to get their input. You may need to talk to DevOps or Backend teams to understand technical constraints or dependencies. During this phase, you also work on an initial timeline for the project. In most cases, the development time/cost will be determined by the specs and design but you should tentatively draft one as a starting point. Lastly, pick a framework that will help you capture the ecosystem you are in. You could use Value Proposition Canvas, Business Model Canvas, or an old school SWOT analysis — or any other acronym you’d like to use -- as long as you use one, you’re good. Raise your hand if you heard of SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats Raise your hand if you heard of value proposition canvas: here’s how it looks like (next slide)
- Raise your hand if you heard of business model canvas: here’s how it looks like (next slide)
- If you never heard of these frameworks, go to strategizer.com to learn about them.
- Once you have a clear vision, you kick-off the design phase by writing user stories, specs, requirements, objectives, wire frames, etc. This will primarily be a collaboration between UX/UI designers and PMs. It’s crucial you run your preliminary wireframes and designs by the engineering team to get their thumbs-up on the feasibility and efficiency. Engineers will always have great feedback on the design based on what’s possible, what’s not, and what can be done in a much simpler way. Make sure to get their seal of approval before you start the production phase. The market research you conduct prior to the design phase will help you shape your product in many ways. First, you’ll adopt the technology/design trends. For example, swiping on an item will delete or show more options or the three-dot icon stands for menu while human icon stands for profile. This way, you’ll make sure you have a user-friendly and intuitive design. Secondly, you need to be very familiar with the designs of similar products so that you can differentiate yours.
- Once you lock down the design of your product, you need to get as many critical eyes as possible to get feedback. You need to conduct focus groups or interviews to test the prototype of the product prior to coding it. Do people get the flow? Do they understand the placement and functionality of each button, menu item, or tab? Ask them questions, make them take actions on the prototype, and get real time feedback. Getting user feedback is one of the most crucial elements of the product development as you want to surface all issues and areas of improvements before you begin the production phase. Doing your due diligence at this step will save you a lot of time and headache later.
- While there are 10 phases of product development, some of them progress in tandem and this is a great example. This is not a waterfall process where you proceed to the next step once you complete the current one. A lot of these initiatives will actually happen simultaneously. You don’t need to wait until you collect all the feedback and finalize the design in order to start the strategy phase. This should be an overarching theme throughout the development cycle and it will evolve over time. This is when you start the launch planning: the timeline for marketing, product release, communication, resource allocation, trainings for internal employees or partners, and internationalization/translations. During this phase, you need to sit down with all cross-functional teams that may be impacted by this product (e.g. people who sell it, market it, support it, troubleshoot it).
- Raise your hand if you’re good at data and keep your hands in the air. Now continue to keep your hand up if you’re “great” at it. (Please pat yourself on the back) In my lectures, I’m constantly asked about top 3 qualities of a PM and I always say: empathy, data, communication -- and prioritization, because I can’t pick my favorite child! Data is one of the most important strong suits you can have as a PM. Everything you do as a PM, every design or decision you make should be influenced or determined by data. So as you design your product, it’s important to contemplate how you will measure success. Your main KPI will often be an obvious one: think about what you’re trying to solve for; success will typically be an increase or decrease in that metric. However, there’s more to measurement. Sometimes you may need a dozen metrics to monitor as you launch a product. Identify each of them and determine how you are going to pull each data point. Put together a plan to build data pipeline, dashboards or use existing ones.
- Even though the description of this phase is rather easy, it may take the longest time. In this phase, your team starts coding based on the final design of the product. Hopefully by now, all engineers have seen the designs many times, given constructive feedback, and asked all their questions. Once you’re done with backend and frontend development, you can proceed to QA. Of course, you don’t have to wait until the entire product is built before you can QA it. Ideally, you will QA continuously as you build. If the production teams (aka your engineers) see your design plans for the first time in this phase, it’s an indicator that there’s a huge flaw in your PM processes and organization as a whole.
- Once the product is fully built, it’s ready for testing internally and externally. Most companies give all their employees access to alpha testing. You want as many internal people as possible to test your product and be confident before you have external eyes on it. While I worked at Facebook for 8 years, there wasn’t a single day I used a bug-free version of the app that didn’t crash. All employees used the beta product to help the dev teams gather data and identify issues before they’re public. If you have the resources, I’d strongly encourage you to do beta testing with a small subset of users. These can be trusted power users, 1% of your user base, people from the industry, or users in a specific geo-location. The more people you involve in testing, the faster you will complete debugging and get ready for the big day.
- And the day has arrived: you have a killer product in your hands with solid marketing plans in place. You’re ready to pull the trigger. Keep in mind that opening the floodgates at once is never a great idea because there will always — I repeat, always — be issues. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to launch a single product without any bugs in my entire career. Sometimes, you may break the entire system unexpectedly. Best case scenario, there will be some crushes, latency issues, or a few bugs. Either way, a gradual rollout will help you identify these issues early on before your whole user base is exposed to them.
- You launched the product and you think your job is done, right? Not so fast! The post-launch phase is crucial to the overall success of your product. In this phase, you will Monitor data daily to make sure you are aligned with your KPIs Keep a pulse on the market by reviewing app store reviews, sending out surveys, etc. Leverage all your internal resources to get more feedback from your users, partners, stakeholders, etc. Brainstorm ideas to iterate the product in future versions – it doesn’t matter if your launch is successful or not, there will always be ways to improve & iterate.
- And that’s it. When you’re done, you rinse and repeat. No one said it would be easy but it’s fun for sure. Of course, there isn’t one single framework for product development -- you may see slightly different versions of this methodology in different books or companies. It really doesn’t matter what methodology you use, as long as you use one. They’re all the same. The bottom line is, you need to be very organized and communicate in every step. There’s no such thing as over-communication. But not communicating enough will always get you into trouble. Strong communication is the best virtue a PM can ever have and it will come handy in every phase of the product cycle.
- Are you discombobulated? Maybe you learned a lot but you have more question marks than ever? Don’t you fret, I can help! If you’d like 1:1 coaching to dive deeper into each phase, as I mentioned before, this is my job! I can totally provide you with the support you need. So reach out to me on Linkedin Lastly, how many of you are actively looking for a job or interviewing? Well, I can help you with that too
- Check out my previous speech at Product School Youtube channel or Facebook page