Presentation at the July 2017 Westerville Web Meetup, which gave an overview of product management for Web Developers using the Ten Truths of Great Products By Design from the introduction of the first edition of Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

1. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT TEAMS
JUSTIN MEATS, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER
@justinmeats

2. WHAT IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?
@justinmeats
Product management is an organizational
lifecycle function within a company dealing with
the planning, forecasting, and production, or
marketing of a product or products at all stages of
the product lifecycle. Similarly, product lifecycle
management (PLM) integrates people, data,
processes and business systems.
— Wikipedia

3. WHAT IS PRODUCT MANAGEMENT?
The role of product management is to
define, develop, deploy and maintain
products that are:
 Valuable
 Usable
 Feasible
It is NOT Project Management
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4. MY JOURNEY INTO PRODUCT
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5. MY JOURNEY INTO PRODUCT
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6. OUR PROCESS
 What is the problem?
 What are the possible solutions / features?
 Description
 UX Mockups/Prototypes
 RICE Prioritization
 Reach: How many customers will this help?
 Impact: How big of an impact will this feature have?
 Confidence: How sure are we? Have we done testing?
 Effort: How long will it take to develop and deploy?
 Reach * Impact * Confidence / Effort
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7. OUR PROCESS
 Agile: 2 week sprints
 Daily Standup
 Bi-weekly retrospective & estimation
 Bi-Weekly Roadmap w/ Product, Engineering & CEO
 Weekly UX Meeting
 JIRA for planning
 Scrum Board for Developers: To Do, In Progress, UAT-Dev, UAT, Done
 Kanban Board for UX prioritized by upcoming sprint: To Do, In Progress, In Review, UAT, Done
 Always iterating & learning
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8. @justinmeats

9. GREAT PRODUCTS BY DESIGN
 Inspiring products do not happen by accident.
 100 uses of “user experience”
 1st edition’s introduction mentions 10 certain truths behind every successful, inspiring product
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10. The job of the product manager is
to discover a product that is
valuable, usable, and feasible.1
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11. @justinmeats

12. Product discovery is a collaboration
between the product manager,
interaction designer, and software
architect.
2
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13. It's really hard to design products by
focus groups. A lot of times, people
don't know what they want until you
show it to them.
— Steve Jobs
Co-Founder and CEO of Apple
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14. If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster
horses
— Henry Ford
Founder of Ford Motor Company
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15. Engineering is important and
difficult, but user experience design
is even more important, and
usually more difficult.
3
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16. Thinking about design is hard,
but not thinking about it can be
disastrous
— Ralph Caplan
Author of By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel …
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17. Engineers are typically very poor at
user experience design—engineers
think in terms of implementation
models, but users think in terms of
conceptual models.
4
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18. People react positively when things
are clear and understandable.
— Dieter Rams
Creator of 10 Principles of “Good Design”
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19. User experience design means both
interaction design and visual design
(and for hardware-based devices,
industrial design).
5
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20. As far as the customer is concerned,
the interface is the product.
– Jef Raskin
Started the Macintosh project at Apple
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21. Functionality (product requirements)
and user experience design are
inherently intertwined.6
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22. It’s not enough that we build products
that function, that are understandable
and usable, we also need to build
products that bring joy and
excitement, pleasure and fun, and yes,
beauty to people’s lives.
– Don Norman
Author of The Design of Everyday Things
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23. Product ideas must be tested—early
and often—on actual target users in
order to come up with a product that
is valuable and usable.
7
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24. Testing with one user early in the
project is better than testing with 50
near the end.
– Steve Krug
Author of Don’t Make Me Think
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25. We need a high-fidelity prototype so
we can quickly, easily, and frequently
test our ideas on real users using a
realistic user experience.
8
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26. If a picture is worth 1000 words, a
prototype is worth 1000 meetings.
– Saying at IDEO
IDEO is a global design company
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27. The job of the product manager is to
identify the minimal possible product
that meets the objectives—valuable,
usable and feasible—minimizing time
to market and user complexity.
9
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28. “Simplicity is the ultimate form of
sophistication.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
Famous artist and inventor
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29. Once this minimal successful product
has been discovered and validated, it
is not something that can be
piecemealed and expect the same
results.
10
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30. Agile is iterative. Design is iterative.
Why couldn’t they work together?
– Jeff Gothelf
Principal at Neo
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31. @justinmeats

32. TAKE AWAYS
 Life is a journey
 Product management is a journey
 Always be learning
 Read / Listen to Books!
 Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
 Meetups:
 CbusProductClub.com
 Lift Product Conference: Monday, 9/24/2018
 Product Hunt Columbus
 Podcasts
 Masters of Scale
 Focus on the customer
@justinmeats
“The constant pursuit of knowledge
and improvement, striving to make
yourself better today than you were
yesterday, is not merely an
indispensable tenet for leaders to
follow, but one of the great joys of
life.”
- Urban Meyer
OSU Football Coach and author of Above the Line

33. QUESTIONS?
Justin Meats
jmeats@orisintel.com
twitter.com/justinmeats
linkedin.com/in/justinmeats
@justinmeats