Decision making process: The most common ones are AIDA and REAN. These are frameworks to model the decision making process. AIDA – Awareness -> interest -> desire -> action.

Attention (get the customers attention, how?), Interest (what are the advantages and benefits of them using your product), Desire (convince them) and Action (what is the action (purchase).

 

REAN: goes into post purchase behaviour: Reach (costumer aware), Engage (considering), Activate (action to purchase), Nurture (nurture the relationship).

 

LEAN: a term used to describe product methodology focusing on gathering customer feedback early on in the product lifecycle through customer development and MVP.

​

Marketing approach: The Product being well showcased, with a price, promotion (ads, PR, etc) and Place for location it will be put.

 

SWOT analysis: A strategic planning technique for identifying Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

​

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

The Five C’s for situational analysis and an overview of a product decision: Company (culture, strategy, brand reputation, strengths, weaknesses, and infrastructure).

​

The Five "Why"s: Getting the the core problem of the user and understanding their goals and frustrations during user interviews.

​

User Interviews: Analysis of who the users are in order to make sure know the PM or UX researcher understand what problem is, who the user is and what their previous has been trying to solve this problem. User interviews can also be done when testing the validity of a solution or trying to validate the product.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Competitors: Competitive environment.  This includes researching the: market share, tradeoffs, positioning, mission and potential future decisions.

Researching customers: demographics, purchase behavior, market size, distribution channels, and customer needs and wants).

Collaborators: Suppliers, distributors or a partnership.

Climate: aspects of time and environment.

​

KPIs: Key performance indicator - the way a product manager measures the success of a feature or product.

 

Product Metrics:

 

User acquisition:

-How many users do we have?

-How and why has our user base grown over time?

-How many active users are there? How do we define what an active user is?

-Where are users coming from? Are they referring their friends?

-What channels are most effective in getting users?

 

Activity:

-How many users are using feature X?

-What percent have completed a particular workflow?

-What are people saying about the product? Do they love it? Can you measure that?

​

Conversion & Retention

-What is the conversion rate (free to paid, visiting to signing up, etc)?

What is the churn rate?

 

Money:

-What is the customer acquisition cost?

-How much does supporting a customer cost?

-How much money does each user bring in?

-What is the lifetime of a value customer?

-What is our revenue growth rate?

 

Measuring can be done through:

-Usability testing.

-Customer feedback.

-Traffic analysis.

-Internal logs.

-A/B testing – for particular changes.

 

Analyze each product by: Users and goals, strengths, challenges/focuses, why does this product excel/struggle, priorities and values, competitors and tradeoffs.

​

Product Manager: Delivery, Product, Costumers. – delivering product to costumers.

A Spec: A document that outlines a new feature or functionality of a product including user personas, etc.
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/product-specs/

 

PM position: Data and communication, the credibility of product management is done through research, analysis to understand trends and priorities, reports influencing graphs ,chats and summaries. After understanding this and the KPIs success the PM then presents her or his findings to leadership, development teams or costumers. 

​

Product positions in the industry vary: Some will have more product marketing on their plate, others may need to know how to code and many won't do either of those things. It really depends on the company.

​

A PM's job analogy, in questions = what game are we playing? How do we keep score? Then go back to prioritization and execution.

​

Road Map: PM build roadmaps and analyze them to understand the outlines of the vision, direction, priorities and progress of a product over time according to both long term and short term goals. 

 

To build a Road Map: A PM must understanding existing product usage patterns and know the features most used. The PM will analyze user metrics, conduct user interviews to understand audience pain points, aggregate costumer feedback and support requests, have an in depth look at competition, commercialization of internal innovation, audience surveys to understand feature prioritization

 

Gaining respect from engineers as a PM: Sometimes there is animosity between engineers who put in the effort to build challenging products when the PM doesn't recognize how much work they put in to create their ideas. In order to combat this a PM must align people around the goal early, always look sharp, treat the team like adults, keep on top with checking in on progress, doing valuable work and letting them focus on the engineer stuff. Not constantly talking about my ideas. Using clear terms, showing thoughtfulness to a feature and understanding the difficulty of creating each new feature (I felt that in video editing). Being reliable and giving credit

​

Launch questions: The product, the launch goals, the launch of design, and launch of implementation (pre launch tasks, launch tasks and post launch tasks).

​

Things to consider with launch: target market, user types, MVP or Full Product, distribution, rollout, buzz, partnerships and risks.

 

​

Goal as a PM – making the unknown known so the tram can focus on asking the right questions.

 

Goal 2: Making sure the product is valuable, feasible, usable and loveable

 

Product Cycle management: The succession of strategies by business management teams that are taken as the product goes through it's life cycle. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

​

​

​

​

​

GOOB – get out of the building and go talk to customers (mainly for user testing and user interviews).

​

Alpha and beta testing – done towards the end of a development process when the product is near a full use state to improve the quality of the product and ensure beta readiness. Beta is done just prior to launch to make sure it’s improved in quality for the customer.

​

Customer development – process of gaining customer insight through interviews.

​

Panelists – group of people that fit into a specific user criteria used for surveys interviews and testing,

​

MVP – a product stripped down into a version of a product that’s launched quickly to gain insight and user feedback in the product lifecycle,

​

CX – customer experience, the interaction between a product and a customer over the duration of the relationship.

​

Stimulus/test criteria – the critical aspect of the experiment tested on a user, which shouldn’t be buried to deep so the product manager can find it.

​

B2C – business to costumer.

​

B2B – business to business.

​

Users/traffic -How many users does the product have?

​

Conversation - How effective does the product convert a visitor to a new user (a free user to a paying user or a paying user to a paying more user)?

​

Referral rates - Do users refer to other users? How often? How can it go viral? 

​

Engagement - Are users highly engaged and activily using the product?

​

Retention - How often do users come back? What is considered a good time for users to frequently visit for a product is varied.

​

Revenue - How does the product make money?

​

Costs - What are it’s development costs?

​

Business models - Financial gain frame works the business earns from.

​

Knowing the user - Understanding the target audience, their hopes, dreams, motivations and frustrations.

​

Marketing funnel - the journey a user takes to acquire or use a product and then maybe return to use it in the future. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

The mentality of a product manager - always asking questions, trying to understand the exact mertics that are revelant for makng decisions. Answering questions with questions until a well suited answer is established.

​

Competitive market analysis - understanding where the users currently go when they don't use your product so you can outshine the competition and also base design on the passed experience users are used to.

​

API – application programming interface, is the messenger that takes request and tells the system what you want to do. It’s a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software applications that define how components should interact. This can extend to third parties as seen in Uber letting Google have the ability to order a rob right from the Google Maps app. Software that allows to applications to talk to each other and forms a sort of of waiter that connects your request for food to the kitchen and back.

​

SaaS – Software as a service.

​

Mock up – a model used to gather user feedback early in the product life cycle.

​

Perception of value – how the mock up measures into the users perception of using it for value.

​

MVP- minimal viable product.

​

GTM – go to market plan. The strategic plan encompassing the major practice used to release, promote and sell the product.

​

GA – general availability, it means the product is fully available for the general public (after alpha and beta releases).

​

BI – business intelligence is a method of compiling, analyzing and interpreting business data.

​

Prototype – A simulation of functionality or design meant to put testers in the proper mindset to answer questions about using the app in user testing.

​

UI – visual dimensions of products for the user to connect to and determine how information and features are laid out to use.

​

UX – how to user fields and navigates using the product through system, utility and efficiency in preforming tasks.
 

Site map – the different navigation routes taken within the website.

​

Roadmapping – Roadmonk and Monday help do roadmapping which helps unify the vision, goals and priorities.

​

Data management – keeping track of information with apps like google sheet, excel and airtable.

​

Heuristic evaluation - A heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles.

​

MOSCOW prioritization – must have, should have, could have and will not have.

​

Agile – a platform used for gathering customer and user feedback on prototypes.

​

Scrum – a method within agile in which the dev team works together to reach a goal.

​

Sprint - cycle of development, often ranging from a week to a month.

​

Epic – an agile term for work that can be broken down into smaller stories.

​

Integration – interaction between two software applications that synchronize data and workflows.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Segmenting – start with a part of the market and then grow once you understand the customer and product better like Amazon (books to shopping).

​

Feature – a product feature that describes a customer benefit and target result in a products appearance, components or capabilities.

​

Frameworks in agile: scrum, kanban and lean development.

​

Kanban model – a theory that prioritizes features by weighting potential customer delight against the implementation investment.

​

Need-gap analysis – an approach for identifying unmet customer needs and how a product or service can fill that gap in the market.

​

Velocity – the amount of work that a team can accomplish during a period of time.

Verification and validation – making sure things met the requirements.

​

YOY – year over year statistical process of comparing data from one year to the former.

​

WiP- Work in progress.

​

Gannt chart – used for scheduling projects.

​

Waterfall – a waterfall development model is a long term product development model conceptualized by different  states where the main thing is that once work in one part is completed you don’t go back.

​

Intuitive design - an easy to understand lay out of functionality of a product. An example for non intuitive design would be a website which is really hard to understand and go through to find what you want. 

​

Module – a set of independent units that can be used to construct a more complex structure like furniture or a building.

​

Iteration – set amount of time set for deployment in agile, typically 1-2 weeks.

​

Feature kickoff – a product feature kickoff is where the product manager and relevant stakeholders set plans, goals etc for a new feature.

​

MRD – market requirements document is a document written by a product manager to help define the market’s requirements for a specific product.

​

Cannibalization – when one product in a company competes directly with another company’s products.

​

​

Behavioural product management  - applying behavioral science and human psychology to product.

​

Churn – a measurement of the percentage of accounts that cancel or choose not to renew subscriptions or in design this could be the amount of frustration a user experiences using a product.

​

Eisehower matrix- a productive, prioritization and time management frame work.

Product market fit - how does the product fit into the current environment and who's the audience that it serves. 

​

Dependency – a relationship between two initiatives that must be executed in a particular oder and are dependent for that reason.

​

Digital transformation – revolutionizing a business processes.

​

User story – a storyline which discusses the users perceptions, goals and problems when using the software.

​

Persona - a not real person who is sort of like a sum of all the users a UX researcher talked to when trying to understand better how to fit a product to match their needs. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

Data - the main things decisions are made by. Typically companies have data teams to utilize so the product manager can use information to progress the success of a product. Otherwise there are high level and in depth services to use to gain insight on fields like the market.

 

Testing:

​

Moderated user test – qualitative data gathering with live interactions to follow up in the user’s experience.

​

Unmoderated user test – with no interaction between team and user, like watching their screen without using qualitative insight questions after.

​

Variant/design concept – a different version of a product or design developed in order to see what will receive the best response from the customers.

​

Gourilla testing - surprising people on the street and asking them if they would be interested in trying out your product and answering some questions about in in exchange for a coffee.

​

Users flow – the entire user experience.

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An example for goals and KPI measurement- could include things like conversion rate, showing the number of users who achieved a specific goal divided by the total number of visitors (such as using a signup form, an intended goal or a call to action)

 

Customer relationship management - doing whatever needs to be done to make sure the user is thriving using your product and has a great overall experience with the company.

​

Interview Questions

​

• Describe your previous product manager experience and your daily tasks?

• An app you like using, how would you improve it?

• Tell me about a product you are familiar with in the X products - How would you improve it?

​

​

Things that need to develop and understand before becoming a PM:

​

Being able to truly listen and ask good questions.

Learning the psychology behind product decisions.

Clarifying the problem that needs to be solved.

Understanding data well.

Understanding how to manage people well and how to be emotionally intelligent.

The ability to present well and get people excited about your product.

Being interested in talking to  customers.

Learning how to prioritize and multi task.

Learning how to give constructive feedback.

Being able to work without receiving much praise and often much blame and pressure.

An ability to keep your eyes on the long term just as much, if not more than the short term.

Understanding different business models and financial models.

Learning to say no to focus on the core problems.

Learning how to test.

Understanding road maps and prioritizing key features, business and catching key opportunities.

​

Code dictionary

 

Data structures - Hold data. The common data structures are Arrays which store in lists, Trees and graphs, Linked Lists, Stack, and Queue.

 

Algorithms – This includes Sorting (which includes binary search which is an algorithm), graph search and more.

​

Languages in code – Refers to the different kinds of coding languages there are like CSS, Javascript, Python, etc.

​

Front End Developers - deal with the hands on things that the screen interacts with, while a backend developer does the behind the scenes strucutres of those things.

​

Some front end examples: HTML is what gives the structure of a website it’s the skeleton, CSS is the aesthetic manager what makes a website beautiful using things like color and Javascript is what makes the website interactive with a user. 

​

Big O Notation – a way to express the efficiency of an algorithm.

 

Recursion: A function that can call on other functions and then can call itself.

 

Syntax – The syntax of code (like language).

 

Function – Self contained modules that preform a specific task.