Product
Management
Guide

The PM role defined
What do Product Managers do?

A Product Manager helps
their team ship the right
product to their users
Josh Elman

A Good Product Manager
knows the market, product,
and competition

A Good Product Manager
communicates the vision &
provides context

A Good Product Manager
is responsible for
communication with internal &
external stakeholders

A Good Product Manager
defines roadmaps &
requirements

A Good Product Manager
creates leverageable
collateral [FAQs, white
papers, presentations…etc.]

A Product Manager is not the
CEO of the product!

Idea Management
How do you manage ideas?

Where do ideas come from?

• Feedback from active users
• Criticism from non-users
• Input from founders & leaders
• Anyone on the team

How do we evaluate ideas?

Ideas go through
this filter

• Link to Vision or Quarterly Goals
• User pain?
• Percentage of users benefitting
• Impact on business
• Is this a “Step Change” (we expect it’ll give at
least a 2x improvement on the chosen metric)?
• Delighter, Satisfier, or Basic Expectation [Kano
Model]
• Effort/Cost Vs Reward

Market & Competitive Analysis
Know thy market!

How do you analyze your target
market?

1. Market Definition
What type of product does the
companies in the market produce?
Who are the group(s) of customers
targeted by these companies?

2. Market Sizing

Top down market sizing
• Find the total market and then estimate
your share of the market
• Optimistic approach

Bottom up market sizing
• How much sales are similar products doing?
• How much of that can you capture?
• A more conservative [read: better] approach

3. Market Growth
The most accurate way to estimate growth
is to study growth drivers such as internet
connectivity, demographic data…etc.

4. Market Attractiveness

5. Market Trends
Market trends are the source of new
opportunities & threats. Examples include:
changes in customer needs, technology
change, government regulations…etc.

How do you analyze your
Competition?

1. Finding Competitors

What problem does your
product solve and for whom?

Use Google
• Google “[your company name] vs “
•How would your users complain
about this problem? Channel your
users
• Search for “site: reddit” or “site:
quora” etc.

4 types of competitors
• Direct competitors
Same problem, same target group
• Indirect competitors
They solve the same problem but in a
different way. Target a different group which
might overlap with yours

4 types of competitors
• Potential competitors
They address a different problem, same
target group
• Substitutes
They address the same core problem but they
take a completely different angle. Typically
target a different group

• Be competitive with direct competitors
• Don’t lose too much customers to indirect
competitors
• Make it hard for potential competitors to
copy you
• Be significantly better than substitutes

2. Competitors Comparison

Compare your company and product
to the competition on several
dimensions in order to be able to
come up with the best strategy and
tactics to compete with them

Keep updating this table as competitors
change their products or something major
happens to them [Ex: funding rounds,
acquisitions…etc.]

Customer Development
The Four Steps to the Epiphany!

More startups fail due to a
lack of customers than from a
failure in product
development

However…
We have processes to manage
product development but we
don’t have processes to manage
customer development

“In a startup no facts exist inside
the building, only opinions.”
Steve Blank

The fundamental concept behind
Customer Development is:
don’t hypothesize everything about
your business/product on your
own, talk to prospective customers
and develop an approach that they
are interested in

Types of user interviews

1. Exploratory Interviews

• Goal: explore, look for insights
• What pains do they have? Are they open to
certain solutions?
• Talk about the context in which they would
use your product. Do they have a substitute?
• Ask open ended questions

2. Validation Interviews

• Goal: test hypotheses out
• Hyper-sensitive to bias. Have to be done in
a careful scientific way
• Don’t introduce your theory until the very
end
• Be as subjective as you can when describing
your idea

3. Satisfaction Interviews

• Goal: find out which parts of the product
are good and which are not
• Understand why they are satisfied or
unsatisfied
• Better be done by third-party

4. Efficiency Interviews

• Goal: find out how to improve your product
• Are they using a certain feature?
• When & how do they use it?
• Is it easy and intuitive enough?

Who should you talk to?

Before your have a product
• You probably have some user groups in mind
• Rate your user groups based on the following
criteria:
• Size – how big is the user group?
• Pain : Payment – ratio between how much pain does the
group have compared to how much are they willing to
pay for the solution
• Accessibility – how easily can you get in contact with
these people?

After your have a product
•Use your data to identify the user groups
that will help you reach a certain goal
• Example: interviewing churning users will
help you decrease churn rate

How do you run the interview?

• Create a comfortable environment
- Respond in a neutral, non-judgmental way
- Don’t ask questions that would make them uncomfortable
• Don’t talk about your solution
- Talk about their problems and needs
•Don’t ask hypothetical questions
- Would you like your existing solution better if it did X? the
answers to this type of questions are usually misleading
• Avoid leading questions

The lean startup
Build. Measure. Learn. Repeat

The goal of a startup is to
figure out the right thing to
build – the thing that
customers want and will pay
for – as quickly as possible

The destination is the startup’s vision,
which is achieved by employing a
strategy. The product is the end result of
this strategy

Products change constantly through a
process of optimization. Less frequently,
the strategy may have to change. That
event is called a pivot. The vision rarely
changes

The vision is achieved through
experiments designed to achieve
Validated Learning – the process
of demonstrating empirically that
a team has discovered valuable
truths about a startup’s present
and future business prospects

A MVP [Minimum Viable Product] is a
technique used to start the learning
process as quickly as possible. It’s the
fastest way to go through the loop with
minimum effort

The goal of a MVP is to test
fundamental business
hypotheses

How do you run a MVP
experiment?

1. Figure out your problem/solution set
2. Identify and order your assumptions
based on risk
3. Build testable hypotheses around your
assumptions
4. Establish Minimum Criteria for Success
5. Build MVP strategy
6. Execute MVP experiment
7. Evaluate and learn from the experiment

Identifying assumptions
• What must be true in order for your idea to
be successful
•Examples:
- My customer has problem X
- X matters to my customer [X could be price,
convenience…etc.]
• Riskiest assumption: the one that if it’s not
true, your product will definitely fail

A hypothesis is a single,
written, testable statement of
what you believe to be true,
with regards to the
assumptions you’ve identified

How a hypothesis should look
like?
• For new products:
We believe [target group] will [predicted
action] because [reason]
We believe home owners will let travelers stay at their
homes because they want to make extra money

How a hypothesis should look
like?
• For existing products:
If we [action], we believe [subject] will
[predicted action] because [reason]
If we add facebook login, we believe conversion rate
will improve by 25% because it’s more convenient for
users

Minimum Criteria for Success help you
decide whether your product is worth
building or not
Compare the overall cost of building
what you want with the expected
reward of building it
“if it’s going to cost X, we need to see Y
improvement on Z metric, to justify
giving the go ahead”

Product Development Process
Process overview & key responsibilities

Speed of iteration >>> Quality of iteration

Data >>> Opinion

Speed without data means you’re
not learning anything

Data without speed means
you’re not learning [& shipping]
fast enough

The Biggest Risk is building
the wrong product
A product that doesn’t
improve success metrics

How do we structure work &
teams?

6 Weeks
Cycles

Each cycle has a theme
Ex: A Better Ride planning
Experience

Each Cycle has a description
• Current status
• Hypotheses
• User tests results/Insights
• NUMBERS

Each Cycle has KPIs
Measures of success

Each Cycle has
2 Deliverables

Big Batch
Big features or stuff that would
take up to 6 weeks to be
completed

Small Batch
Smaller things, tweaks, and minor
adjustments that should take
anywhere from a day to two
weeks to complete

Think it
Low-cost product discovery

How do we manage ideas?

Idea Filter

How do we evaluate ideas?

• Link to Vision or Quarterly Goals
• User pain?
• Percentage of users benefitting
• Impact on business
• Is this a “Step Change” (we expect it’ll give at
least a 2x improvement on the chosen metric)?
• Delighter, Satisfier, or Basic Expectation [Kano
Model]
• Effort/Cost Vs Reward

How do we prioritize features?

Value Vs Cost

Opportunity Scoring

Ian McAllister’s Framework
1. Define important themes
2. Prioritize themes
3. Generate ideas
4. Estimate each idea’s impact
5. Estimate each idea’s cost
6. Prioritize ideas within each theme

However…
Product Strategy Rules!

How do we do Specs?

Product Definition Document

How do we build our roadmap?

1. Why our product exists and
how we approach running it

2. Goals & progress against
goals
For each goal, give some context and
explain [numerically] what has
happened in the time since the last
roadmap update

3. Recent updates
What has been delivered since the last
roadmap update? What's gone well,
what hasn't, and what have we
learned?

4. Themes [Current]
What are we going to be focusing on
this quarter?

5. Themes [Near-term]
What are we going to be focusing on
next [1-2]quarter[s]?

6. Themes [Long-term]
What are we going to be focusing on
over the next year?

That’s it for now
This is still a Work In Progress; I’ll keep
updating it regularly

You can reach me on
hussamshams@gmail.com