Third post of the new series of posts on 4 key strategic skills in Product Management. In this third post, we will focus on design.
The role of the product manager and his or her responsibilities vary from industry to industry. Each product operates in a different environment and this causes variations.
But, even taking this into account, there are 4 key strategic skills in Product Management that are intrinsic and that we will discuss in this series.
Key Strategic Skills in Product Management: Product Design
Product design is the process of imagining, creating and iterating products that solve user problems or address specific needs in a given market.
The key to successful product design is understanding the end user, the person for whom the product is created. Product designers try to solve real problems for real people using empathy. Also knowledge of habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs and desires.
There are three areas that are addressed through design, which are:
Customer Discovery Insights
In early stage start-ups, product managers are often responsible for executing their own customer research. While, in larger organizations, they work closely with designers, UX researchers or product marketers.
Regardless of the resources available, the project manager is solely responsible for ensuring that their discovery efforts achieve unique insights. In this way, the product direction will be shaped.
Product roadmap
It dictates what is integrated into the product and when. Roadmap elements can range from new features to bug fixes, redesigned or enhanced experiences. Also infrastructure or back-end related initiatives, or growth and monetization efforts. Whenever time is required by the product team, it should be reflected in the roadmap.
Product requirements
Serve as a forcing function to think through the details of your new feature experience. Also as a critical communication tool with a variety of stakeholders.
Help designers understand the guidelines around the experience they need to design. Also engineers to understand the subtleties of the experience they need to implement and evaluators to understand the expected behavior of the experience they need to test.
In the next and final post we will talk about another key variable: execution.
Photo credit: SSP
