A Guide for Startup Product Managers
A Thought Leader Guest Post from Dal Adamson of Medium:
How I take an idea and turn it into a product
10 steps on how to tear an idea down to brass tacks, build it up, and ship it into the market.
A startup product manager’s role is to develop product strategy, research and define products, and coordinate the tactical execution of products from inception to go-to-market. Here’s the process I go through to take an idea to market.
There’s a lot of variation within each step. I’m not going to get into that, rather, I’m going to give you an overview of my process to help those with less experience better understand the day-to-day items.
How I go about it
At Teem we craft products to make working in an office easier for employees. In the example below when I say “space” I’m talking about spaces within an office — like a meeting room.
(1st) Understand and break down the idea:
Finding and using the right space should be frictionless.
This idea came from zach holmquist in one of our early product meetings. This idea is specific to our domain of workplace tools for employees. You’ll have completely different ideas but can break them down in a similar way to know what to ship. Let’s break this thought down into something specific.
Finding: Employees/users have to find a space. How do they do it now? Apply this workflow to an adjacent idea. What methods do we employ to find other things? How is finding a meeting room similar to finding your gate at an airport or the bar you’re meeting friends at?
Using: The user has a distinct purpose for finding the space. People use space differently, and different spaces are built for varying use. What patterns are there? Can we group these patterns into underlying structures or mental models to understand how our users think?
The right space: This is similar to the one above it (using). However it communicates that, at least in some instances, there can be “wrong” spaces.
Should: Should != Must. Should implies some level of acceptable imperfection in the process/experience.
Frictionless: What is the experience today? What causes friction? What friction can be eliminated?
(2nd) Review the user’s current experience from a high level.
Today most employees find a meeting room in three ways. First, they look around from their chair to see which rooms are open. Second, they compare room schedules in Outlook to see what’s not scheduled. Problem is — calendars are about 65% accurate. Finally, they walk around the office until they find an open room, often peeping into rooms to see if they’re open.
(3rd) Mash the current user experience with the idea.
What friction can be removed from that experience? Let’s focus on the user on the go, who walks around the office to find a room. To eliminate the aimless search, the user needs to know of an available room that fits their needs. Then they could walk directly to the right space and use it without the friction of checking other spaces.
Goal: user knows the right space, knows if it’s available to use, and knows how to get there — as fast and as effortless as possible.
You’ve now taken an idea, and created a product vision for an individual product or feature. To be successful at steps 2 & 3 you need to...
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Thanks for this Guest Post and its graphics to Dal Adamson of Medium.
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