books--inspired

The product manager has two key responsibilities: 
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- assessing product (that is valuable) opportunities
- defining the product (usable, and feasible) to be built.

Different roles in a product organization
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- Product managers (the key is that it describes the functionality and behavior of the product to be built, and not how it will be implemented.)
- UX Designers ( These people are responsible for developing a deep understanding of the target users (each persona that you’re trying to 
satisfy in your pro) and coming up with the tasks, navigation, and flow that are both usable and productive.)
- Project managers (Once the product has been defined, the product development team will take on the project and begin building the product. 
The project scheduling and tracking function is the core of project management)
- Engineering (Responsible for actually building the product)
- Site Operations (The site operations team is responsible for keeping this service running.)
- Product Marketing (The product marketing team member is responsible for telling the world about the product, managing the external-facing product 
launch, providing tools for the sales channel to market and sell the product, and for leading key programs such as online marketing campaigns and 
influencer marketing programs.

Product Management vs Product Marketing
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- The product manager is responsible for defining—in detail—the product to be built, and validating that product with real customers and
users. The product marketing person is responsible for telling the world about that product, including positioning, messaging and pricing,
managing the product launch, providing tools for the sales channel to market and sell the product, and for leading key programs such as 
online marketing campaigns and influencer marketing programs.

Project Manager traits 
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- Sense of urgency, Framers, Clear thinking, data driven, decisiveness, judgement, attitude


Aspects of UX design
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- Interaction Design 
- Visual design 
- rapid prototyping 
- usability testing 

Product Managers personal traits 
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- Product Passion, Customer empathy, intelligence, work ethic, integrity, confidence, attitude

Skills required by product managers 
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- applying technology, focus, time management, communication skills, business skills, 

Product Director/VP role 
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These people have two essential responsibilities. First, they must build a strong team of product managers. 
Second, they are responsible for the company’s overall product strategy and the various products in the company’s portfolio.

Metric to measure product managers
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- Net Promoter Score 


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Phases of Product Development 
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Phase 1 -  Assessing product opportunities 
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The purpose of a good product opportunity assessment is to either 
(a) prevent the company from wasting time and money on poor opportunities by ultimately proving the idea should be shelved for now, or 
(b) for those opportunities that are good ones, focus the team and understand what will be required to succeed and how to define that success.

The questions to answer in this phase 
-Exactly what problem will this solve? (value proposition) 
-For whom do we solve that problem? (target market) 
-How big is the opportunity? (market size) 
-How will we measure success? (metrics/revenue strategy) 
-What alternatives are out there now? (competitive landscape) 
-Why are we best suited to pursue this? (our differentiator) 
-Why now? (market window) 
-How will we get this product to market? (go-to-market strategy)
-What factors are critical to success? (solution requirements) 
-Given the above, what’s the recommendation? (go or no-go)

The output of this is MRD (Marketing Requirement Document). 
The opportunity assessment should just discuss the problem to be solved, not the particular solution you may have in mind.

Phase 2 -  Product Discovery 
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- First, you need to discover whether there are real users out there who want this product.
- Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is valuable, usable, and feasible.

In this phase, it's helpful to come up with product principles. Coming up with product principles means deciding what is important to you—and 
what is incidental—and deciding what is strategic and fundamental, and what is simply tactical and temporary. This helps in prioritization.

Activitites in this phase 
- Market Research -> Following tools are used during this phase 
  - Customer Surveys 
  - Site Analytics 
  - Data mining 
  - Site visits
  - Usability Testing 
  - Competitive analysis 
- Creation of personas 
  - The persona is an archetype description of an imaginary but very plausible user that personifies these traits—especially their 
  behaviors, attitudes, and goals.
  - Benefits of personas
    - Personas help you prioritize what’s important. Personas often help you prioritize the importance of these different users, 
    and also realize where you need a separate user experience.
    - Personas are a very useful tool for describing to your entire product team who the product is for, how they will use it, and why they will care
- Creation of high fidelity prototype of MVP
- Product Validation (using the prototype)
  - Feasibility Testing 
  - Usability Testing
  - Value testing 
- Creation of Charter User Programs 

The output of this phase should be high fidelity prototype which should represent the MVP 

Phase 3 - Product Development Execution
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- Improving existing products : Keep a strong focus on how people are using your product and how you can improve them further piece by piece
- Gentle Deployment : Don't ship features which are not required. They may lead to unnecessary hassle for user and do it in a graceful 
(backward compatible, partial deployment) manner
- Rapid response : As soon as you release the product, create a team to focus on user issues and give them prompt response. That is the time
they may need most support. Also don't shy away from fixing and shipping short releases at that time. 


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End - stages of the product development 
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Product economics questions 
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-Do you understand the economics of your product? 
-Do you know your exact revenue model? 
-Do you know the total costs of your product? 
-know how much you pay for each new customer? 
-Do you know their lifetime value to the company? 
-Do you know the return your product has generated for the company?

Role of Emotions 
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- People buy and use products largely for emotional reasons. The best marketing people understand this, and the best product people ensure 
that their products speak to these emotions.
- In the consumer space, the dominant emotions get more personal. If I buy this product or use this Web site, 
I will make friends (loneliness), find a date (love or lust), win money (greed), or show off my pictures or my taste in music (pride).
- In the enterprise space, the dominant emotion is generally fear or greed.
- For product ideas, look for anger, exasperation, and frustration in people's lives
- Keep in mind also that different types of users may bring different emotional needs to the table.
- Once you have clearly identified and prioritized the dominant buying emotions your customers bring to your product, focus on that emotion
and ask yourself where else they might be able to get that need met? That’s your real competition.
-  Dividing users based on emotions - the Lover, the Irrational, the Efficient, the Laugher, and the Comfortable.
  - The Lovers (Innovators) are the techies who buy the product because they find the technology cool. These people may mislead PMs as they
  buy products for reasons different from normal user
  - On the other hand, the Irrationals (Early Adopters) feel the same emotions as the general population, but with more intensity.
  The Irrationals can teach you the value of your product all the way down the line. 
  - The Efficients (Early Majority) will adopt when the technology becomes practical. Again, they feel the same emotion, but they’re more 
  pragmatic about the benefits versus the costs.
  - The Laughers (Late Majority, and Yahoo’s core constituency) feel the same emotion, but it’s more muted and they don’t want to deal with any 
  grief in order to get the benefits.
  - The Comfortable (Laggards) are the 15% that want the benefits but it just has to be drop dead simple and convenient for them to make the move
- If you can tap into any one of those emotions that every human everyday feels—loneliness, insecurity, fear, frustration, anger—some bit 
of that freshman thing, then you’re on the right track.
  
Keys in consumer internet space
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Usabiliy (includes performance), personas, scalability, availability, customer support, privacy and data protection, viral marketing, 
globalization, gentle deployment, community management 

Keys in enterprise space
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Usability, Product actually needs to work, Specials, customers and charter user programs, Design for the sales channel, customer vs user, 
product installation, "Product configuration, customization, and integration", Product update, The sales process (make your product easy to
try and buy)

Keys in platform space
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- The application provider is going to be concerned with business viability—their viability if they use your services, and your viability in
case you go out of business or discontinue support for the platform.
- The developers are looking for services that make it easy for them to quickly create maintainable, reliable code in the languages they want
- The end-users care mainly about the end result.
- It is a big (but common) mistake to optimize for developers over the end-user.

Best Practices
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- Role of product management 
- Role of UX
- Opportunity Assessment 
- Charter User Programs 
- Product principles
- Personas
- Focus on discovery 
- The use of prototypes 
- Test prototype with target users 
- Measure to improve

Product Manager's worry list
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-Is my product compelling to our target customer? 
-Have we made this product as easy to use as humanly possible? 
-Will this product succeed against the competition? Not today’s competition, but the competition that will be in the market when we ship? 
-Do I know customers who will really buy this product? Not the product I wish we were going to build, but what we’re really going to build? 
-Is my product truly differentiated?Can I explain the differentiation to a company executive in two minutes? To a smart customer in one minute? To an industry analyst in 30 seconds
-Will the product actually work? 
-Is the product a whole product? How will customers actually think about and buy the product?Is it consistent with how we plan to sell it?
-Are the product’s strengths consistent with what’s important to our customers? Are we positioning these strengths as aggressively as possible? 
-Is the product worth money? How much money? Why? Can customers get it cheaper elsewhere? 
-Do I understand what the rest of the product team thinks is good about the product?Is it consistent with my own view?

Random thougts
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- Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user’s needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what’s just 
now possible
- The key is that the user experience design needs to happen before the implementation begins. This is one situation where sequential is 
important.The requirements and design happen together, and then implementation and test can happen together.
- Lessons from apple - Hardware serves the software, software serves the UX, UX serves the emotion. They understand better than anyone else the role 
that emotion plays in getting consumers to crave, buy, and love a product.
- Beware of special(custom requirements) - One of the surest ways to derail a product company is to confuse customer requirements with product 
requirements.Reasons - first, it’s extremely difficult for the customer to know what he needs until he sees it; second, customers don’t know what’s possible;