Chapters Summary Of "The Product Book: How To Become A Great Product Manager"

Keywords: Product management, Career development, Professional skills, Leadership, Marketing strategies, Customer insights, Agile methodology, Product lifecycle

In the chapter one of The Product Book, it introduced the main duties of product manager. I realized that there was not only one type of the product manager after reading the detailed information of chapter one. The product manager with a strong technical background could become a technical product manager; the product manager who has a strong business-oriented background could undertake strategic product management. Moreover, growth product manager and mobile product manager are another two choice as they focus more on the specific skills, which could help to grow products. For example, the product manager of Alibaba Group is divided into two fields. One is called platform product manager, which works with development and test team and is responsible for products construction, products design and functional implementation. Another is called business product manager, which works with marketing and operations team and is responsible for demands discovery, products management and follow-up operations. In the job description of business product manager, the Alibaba Group asks manager to be a good listener, listening to the business planning, strategy and needs; the manager should be an excellent speaker, explaining the concepts and details of product design and driving project progress and operations; the manager should be an inspiring leader, leading the team to accomplish the demand analysis, product design and project implementation in order to ensure the successful release of new products; the manager should also be a decisive decision maker, analyzing the business needs of the Alibaba ecosystem, designing the related products and services and providing solutions.

In the chapter two, I think it is important to a company to determine a clear mission statement and then define key personas for different customers. Some companies without missions could become successful, but they will encounter bottlenecks when they try to expand the company. The customer persona is based on the analysis and research of real customers and will help the company to understand customers personal motivations, preferable communication styles and the acceptance of the brand.

For example, WeChat and TikTok, two of the most popular social media apps in China now, have many of the same customers, but their internal personas are completely different. WeChat users are able to message friends instantly, share music, post images in the social feed of friend’s update, which is called “Moments”. It also allows users to book doctor appointments, pay electricity fees and traffic fines and so on. On the other hand, the TikTok is more focus on providing a platform that allows users to watch musical clips, create their own music videos, and add special effects to clips. WeChat understands who the customers are and why those customers are using their products. Allen Zhang, the president of WeChat, has proposed that they pursue to put user value first, provide opportunity for innovation, and make commercialization invisible. According to WeChat User Age Distribution Data and New WeChat contacts Data, we will know that WeChat is continuing to make gains into the middle age and senior age groups and at the same time the most of new contacts added are now work related. The reason why WeChat has become successful is that the entire WeChat team has a deeper understanding of their customer personas and implements their mission very well.

In the Chapter three, it is important that as a product manager, it wound not be afraid of coming up the wrong opinion of the hypothesis for the company, if you are able to quickly realize and adjust it, which will prevent the company from failing to grow customers and help the company to further success. Forming a good opinion first needs to pick a specific goal and then serve this goal. In order to achieve this goal with an actual product, we have to translate our business goal into a product goal. The iteration seems to be the most important to products. It does not mean a small change of the product. The operation model of the app may be changed. Developing new things would be a good way to achieve the company’s goal and satisfy the customer’s needs. Continued with the example of WeChat mentioned above, in order to improve general users and merchants’ satisfactions, which could translate into “providing a platform to develop customers own online services”, WeChat has determined to develop the Mini Program in the app. The Mini Program, a software carrier that does not require any traffic to download and can be used immediately, has reduced the user’s time spent on downloading the specific company app. Any users are able to open their own online store within the Mini Program. WeChat took a big step and the Mini Program is expected to grow even better in the future.

In the chapter four, as a product manager, after finishing above steps what we should do now is to propose a hypothesis about next steps. Conducting the SWOT research is very helpful for the company to clearly understand if its opportunity hypothesis fits in the company’s goal. The SWOT represents the strength, the weakness, the opportunities, and the threat. As a product manager, it is essential to know how the opportunity would help your company. The opportunity may help the company to improve its strength but may also not be worth pursuing if it does not relate to any of the top-priority items. However, how can we validate our opportunity hypothesis? The most useful way would be doing interview. In person interview is always better than phone chants or video chat, but we should keep on mind that our customers may be distributed in different cities and even around the world. Social networking is especially important at this time. For example, AUrate, a New York based jewelry company, wants to open the Chinese market and they hope their Chinese employee who is just graduated from Hofstra to do some research for this decision. This employee later sent messages on WeChat group chat to invite Chinese alumni to hang out with him and interview about how they think of their company’s decision. After seeing the message, my friend and I were curious about this brand and went to the city to meet this employee. He invited us to drink coffee, introduced us the company’s history, showed us some of their best-selling products and allowed us to try and take pictures. Then he kindly asked us about how we look at their products and the decision to expand the Chinese market made by the company. The whole interview process made us feel very comfortable so that we share lots of inner thoughts to him. I think this is also one of the reasons why this company could succeed. Take steps to validate your idea will help get your product started the right way.

In the chapter five, we know that the importance of product requirements documents (PRD), which explains the reason why the product is built. I think a good PRD should craft great stories first because good stories will attract customers. However, it is never an easy thing to write great stories. When the product manager are conceiving stories, it is especially important to use detailed descriptions to drive customers to imagine. The power of detail is huge, because its existence makes the story more delicate, real and touching. Note that do not contain too much jargon that both customers and stakeholders could not understand in the stories.

It is important that the product manager is able to communicate it to the stakeholders well and got everyone onboard. For example, Tiffany jewelry, many people know this brand from a famous movie called Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). In this movie, Audrey Hepburn wearing a classic black evening dress came to the Tiffany shop window on the Fifth Avenue in New York. She was looking at the Tiffany’s shop with an envious look while eating breakfast and this is a romantic love story. To be a great product, it is not about how many users you have, but how high the popularity of the products. To improve product popularity and reputation, it is necessary to create a touching story that is able to spread itself.

In chapter six, I think visual designers and prototypers play decisive roles in product design. As the product manager, we need to coordinate the cooperation between design and engineering teams to ensure those early users satisfy with the design and give positive feedbacks. After the design team builds, the prototypers will assess the product performing by usability testing, which is critical to product design. However, it must to be mentioned that the usability testing is not able to test the hypothesis validation talked about above. Therefore, a product manager should make sure the product has usable design, which means customers can easily use the product solve their problems without looking for other solutions.

A good product manager should also consider the future of current product and make a choose which is better for future even if it may seem weird so far. WeChat group made a major change in this summer. It introduced the concept of “Information Flow” for all of the official accounts that users have subscribed in WeChat app. In the latest version of WeChat subscription lists, all the article information has been turned into beautiful cards with pictures instead of only text introductions in the previous style. In addition, the official accounts that users liked before are no longer allowed to be placed at the top of subscription list. In the new version, each article only displays title rather than briefly summary. Many users are not used to this change, but it reduced the entry level of subscription messages and help users to better reach the content. In the long term, this change will not only prompt operators to pay more attention on the title and pictures but also block commercial accounts to expand e-commerce services in WeChat.

In the chapter seven, I think the most important is that how a product manager deal with the relationships with engineers. We have heard a lot of conflicts happened between engineers and product managers. When engineers think about product failures, they focus on how to fix the problem that has been raised, but the product manager may only consider on how to avoid this problem. For example, if there is a problem with the payment process, the engineer may think about fixing it while the product manager may look for some resources that could waive fees within a certain period of time to bypass the payment process first and prevents loss of users. It is well known that engineers are highly intelligent people who are often independent and care more about solving problems. In order to avoid the above contradiction happens, the first thing the product manager should do is to communicate with engineers as early as possible in the project and try to participate in the problem solving by ask the engineer what the detailed problem is and whether they need your help. As a product manager, the most basic thing is to trust our engineers and respect them. It is necessary to get to know our engineers. We could invite our engineers to participant in the needs collection and needs assessment in the prior period of project. Engineers may help us to better estimate the scope of the entire task, because they usually have more comprehensive understanding of the project’s features. In addition, what we have to consider is that engineers often have to deeply concentrate on their work, so that the product manager should ensure to pay off the technological debts in time to help engineers focus on developing and updating products.

In the eighth chapter, it is time to work with marketing team. Product launch is the first thing that must be done when the product goes to market. In order to better launch a product, the product manager needs to figure out who we want to invite to the launch event and what is the theme, size and time of this launch event. I think what matters most to launch product first is how to solve user perception of the product. Turning customers into brand fans requires a long process of psychological construction. In order to get an excellent effect after product launch, we need to raise customer’s awareness of the product in advance. Although customers do not know what the product is, they know this product is exactly what they want and look forward to it. To solve user perception, the first thing needs to do is to identify who users are and then deliver the information in a reasonable way. Take the example of WeChat Mini Program mentioned above, Allen Zhang, the president of WeChat and the vice president of Tencent, has announced that they will launch the Mini Program to achieve some features of other Apps in 2016. He pointed out that people had to reinstall the Apps every time they purchased a new phone and the Mini Program is a new way to replace reinstalling different Apps. Why did WeChat announce this new feature two year ago? In fact, it was trying to solve the problem of user cognition. WeChat chose Allen Zhang, who seems like a legend within social media industry, to convey this news rather than issuing a press release because WeChat knew exactly what its target users are and how to efficiently deliver information to customers.

In the ninth chapter, the product is finally launched, and it is the time to celebrate. The product manager needs to assess the whole launching process and think about the next step. Is it possible for team to continuously develop new features of the product? After reading this chapter, I think one of the most important skills that a product manager needs is to have insight. When WeChat was in its 1. 0 version, many people did not believe WeChat will survive because compared to other similar Apps launched in the same period, WeChat only had a small growth of daily users. Allen Zhang received a lot of questions, but he did not stop exploring new features of WeChat. After seeing the emerge of Talkbox, a mobile social product providing message dialogue and message push service, Allen Zhang thought that the opportunity was coming. He later decided to add voice chat features and that was the WeChat 2. 0 version. He played a key role that lead WeChat becomes what it is today. The problem most startups firms has faced is that the boss highly intervenes the daily business; the sale looks down upon products; the engineer thinks the product development is too fast. The startup firms may lack of stuff and the product managers have to deal with a lot of problems in various fields including technology, operations and business. So, it is important to always remember what the product is and what the company mission is.

All in all, startups firms need to pay more attention on different demands control. The product manager should know how to say “no” to the team. Everyone in the team has plenty of ideas want to turn into reality, but most ideas are not the things customers want. For example, working for a book recommendation sharing website, the marketing team wants to attract more customers by adding one-click buying feature of reading related products such as pencil and notebooks. If I am the product manager of this startup company, I would think our goal is to be a community for sharing reading recommendation. Although many people who love reading will take notes, they may prefer to take online notes rather than handwriting notes. On the other hand, if the customer wants to purchase notebooks or pencil, Amazon would be a better choice as it provides faster shipping methods and perfect return process. In general, the large established company has a long process to accomplish the project and also has many project managers emphasizes on different fields. A detailed product requirements document is especially important when you work in a large company.

The whole company system is integrated. However, if one of the processes has a problem, the whole machine may not work. For example, in Amazon, if a stuff working on product display criticize the payment segment will result in some serious problems. The unreasonable situation happens in a large company is caused by complex information communication and irresponsibility. Especially in the progress of product design, it is easy to receive incorrect information if employees transfer their ideas through documents.