Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey everyone, My name is Parker x and welcome to my Skillshare course. I've been in product management for the last seven years. And my last venture, I helped scale company called delivery Jews, where I was responsible for everything product. That means leading UX and working with designers. That means actually hiring engineers at all the engineering hiring, There's Engineering Management. I sat on the executive team, so I got a pretty well-rounded product experience doing that. We eventually got acquired, which is really exciting. Now I'm working on a new startup and I also teach high-level concepts of product management on my YouTube channel where I have about 2500 subscribers. I wanted to take the basics of Product Management and put together a course that I wish that I had when I got started, because I got started seven years ago. It was basically just reading a ton of books and trying to take all of that and put it into practice is really hard. So I messed up. I launched from that apps are launched and what apps? But I'm going to put everything into a couple core lessons here so you can understand what product management's all about. There'll be a class project, a book recommendation, and a podcast recommendation for pretty much every piece should be super easy. I hope you enjoy the course.
2. Getting Started: Let's get started. What is product management? Product management is the triad, or it's sits between the three parts of any good product, which is design, development and business. You need to start with different problems. Identify what's the biggest problem that you can solve and come up with solutions for it. Engineering and design are very expensive. It takes a lot of resources to build something from scratch. So when you go to make that, that you want to be very sure that you've spent the time understanding why are we doing this? How are we going to do it? What's the user experience going to be for the customer or the user? Getting ahead of all of that, filling in the white space before any design or code is written is very important and why product managers are some of the highest paid couriers intact. In this course, we'll have a class project. This will be essential for you to understand what it actually means to be a product manager, what's expected of you. We'll use a case study which is an app that I built that we can use to come up with what's called a product requirements document. So by the end of this course, you will written your first product requirement document. I'll link a free template below for what I've used to build every product that I've ever done. So if you hear me use the words PRD and the letters PRD, that's what it stands for product requirement document. If you Google it, you'll see a ton of different variations of it. This is the one that I've used an iterated on over the last 567 years.
3. Class Project: So your class project, as I mentioned before, we'll be writing a product requirement document, which we'll get into in a little bit. The app is for entertainment on-demand. So think Uber for entertainers. If you wanted to get a live entertainer like a magician or a flame thrower, or a DJ or solo singer to come to your office, party, house party, some event. And just a couple of taps, you can book that entertainer and you can have them come to your home, track them along the way. And on the entertainer side, you can build your book of business and turn your passion into a career. So the class project, we'll be using that template of the PRD to solve the problem. That is, as a customer, I don't know where the entertainer is. I don't know the status of the order as soon as I submit it, I'm confused. I don't know what to do. So as you can see, that's a tricky problem. There might be 10 different solutions. And that's the role of the product manager is to find out what is the biggest problem going on. So that phrase of as a customer, I don't know where the entertainer is. I just ordered it. I'm not sure where it is. I'm not sure the status finding that out as part of the job and then another part of the job is identifying what the potential solutions would be. So that'll be a high level of what the class project is. And you'll learn more as we go through each section in this class, what you need to do in order to write a good PRD.
4. How to write a Product Requirement Document: Hey everybody, welcome to this lesson on product requirement documents. Before you build a house, there's a plan, There's a blueprint. There's a great idea of what's going to happen. There might be a little changes along the way. However, there's a big plan before any of the people show up to build the home. And that's kinda similar to what a product requirement document is. Sounds kinda lame because it has the word document in it. But it's not, I promise you, if it's actually pretty fun because as you start to make these and see it, your ideas go from a piece of paper to reality where it's piece of software on a phone that you can tap around on. It's, it's awesome. Next, we're going to start out with the template and I'll even link to this. And then we'll jump through a really basic PRD that I've written. That's simple, so we can just use that as a solution. So here you have the document. You always want to start with why, what is the problem that we're working on? That's my coffee maker. What's the problem that we're focusing on? Why does it matter? Why are we working on this? Because as I mentioned in a previous lesson, it's all about understanding the problem, living in that problem space. So as you can see here, why are we working on this? Focus on the problem. I would spend way more time on this than you think because you're probably not focusing on the problem as much as you think, then you want to go through what is the objective, what's the goal we're going for? Is it a revenue generator? Are we trying to get more users? Are we trying to just launch this thing? Who is it for now? Every single one of these, you just want to make less dumb. I promise you your requirements. Dm, you want to make it as smart, as specific as possible. You can say, okay, well, this is for, let's say we're doing single sign-on, we have a problem or users get to our app and they're not even logging in and I even creating an account. Well, maybe the objective of that goal would be to get users through the door quicker. There might be ten solutions for that single sign-on is one of them login with Facebook, Twitter, Google, but what about a phone number? I don't have a phone number. Who is it for? Well, this is for customers that are signed up for our app and I'm not logged in. And the objective of the work is to get users to create an account or Sign-in faster so we don't lose them at the very front doorstep of our little home that we're building for them. Then we ask ourselves, well, when does this new idea here, and when does it appear? It appears the second of the user opens the app after they get a fresh install of the application. If we have no cookies, which a cookie, they don't worry about it. But it basically like if we had a previous session, sorry, that we could get them to login. You'll notice that with like Spotify for instance, if I delete the app and re-install it and open it up, I'm still logged in something to keep in mind. When does this appear for us? It's simple, but for different use cases, there can be 10 times the thing appears if you're building notifications, when does it appeared solution, this is where you'd linked to a mock-up. So generally you're using a, working with a designer. But what I find really helpful is these note pads. So there I think it's like 2.5 by one or a four by four by two. That seems more accurate, but it's about the size of a phone. And then you get your pan and you just start sketching, sketch out your ideas. And it will just make it a lot easier to go to a website like modern dot design or just type in mobile UI patterns, reference different absolute, you've used the most C, you can take what they're doing and put it into your own idea that dependency are there things that team needs to support outside this feature in order for this idea to work to something. Don't worry about this as much because you're a beginner. Functional requirements. These are also called user stories on there's a lot of different names for this, but you're basically just writing out statements that explain what the, who the user is and what they need to do, how to interact with the product. So as a customer, I want the ability to and if you decided to go this single sign on Raul, which is login with Facebook, Twitter, Google. As a user, I need to be able to login with Facebook. As a user, I need to be able to unlink my account from Facebook. You'll notice that with most single sign-on accounts as a user, I can no longer update my password if I have single-sign-on. So there's edge cases that you need to think about. And again, because this is for beginners, don't worry so much about functional requirements and non-functional requirements. These pieces, you'll learn as you get more into the idea of progress requirements. And working with engineers, especially focus on the why, focus on the objective. We'll go through the rest of these non-functional requirements. These are more for on the engineering side, there might be something like if you have low conductivity and you're logging in with Facebook and you have one bar service, get connectivity again, maybe we can make it right without having them to do anything. So that could be like an example of a non-functional requirement. And then KPIs and metrics. This is bread and butter for product manager, because if you're just making something and you don't know how it's being used, Let's socks. So a metric might be number of users that land on the homepage to login. Number of users who sign in, Google, number of users who sign in with Twitter, and number of users who sign in with, as you can see, I'm just kinda listing alec as a product manager, similar to user story as a product manager, I want to be able to know did the work that we completed help more sign-ups happened as a product manager, did. Most folks like using Twitter. They like using Google as a product manager. Are we having less forgot password requests? See kinda just think outside of just that specific little thing that you're doing. Not only do you want to track how it's going so that you can wake up the next day after you launch it and see was it a win or not? But think of how it might affect the rest of the product. Maybe your sign-ups went up, but then your login flow changed because people were confused. They can't continue with email as easily, maybe something and then design change to, let's take a look now at one that I filled out. This is a really simple one. So this is for the live entertainment. And in this case, we have a problem. Most folks don't want to allow permissions for notifications on consumer applications. And if you're ordering something that's live and it's going to show bigger Alice to person that's there to entertain. Really important that person ordering it's on the same page. So there's an order status update like Hey, this person is on the way or hey, this person's to do message. They don't have notifications on, they're going to miss that message. And then this person's going to show up or not show up. But it's a huge problem. And a lot of people just don't have notifications turned on. And then adversely, if you're an entertainer and you don't have notifications about when you're requested for new gig, your Angus show up, let me know about it. Maybe the app is sitting in a folder somewhere you downloaded and you weren't sure about it. Notifications matter. Those are it's kinda like a two-fold problem where it's on both sides of the marketplace and you would usually get a little bit more minute. It depends on team sizes. I have an engineering team that can support both these very easily. So then the objective of this would be to notify the entertainer about the importance of allowing for notification. And basically just keep both sides of the marketplace, both the people ordering the staff and the people on the surface and tune with what's going on. It looks like I actually shaved this down to just before the entertainers. So who's a forward for the entertainers when they're setting up their account. And I show when it should show up, I made a basic flow. This is in Figma, but I know that after entertainers open up a bank account, or sorry, connect their banking out, that's when we should hit them with a notification asked. You'll notice that when you go and order food from DoorDash and breeds any of those equivalents. The Secondly, you order the food is the second that they usually ask you for a notification ask. So it'll be like, Hey, you want to know where your foods that you should definitely tap this allow button. So that would be an example requirements. I know that, uh, sorry, and dependencies. I know that there's some technical depends on season here we have functional requirements as, as an entertainer, I should know, but the benefits of allowing notifications before accepting as an entertainer, I should see a preview of the alert with circle around the option if I need to select and we have some non-functional requirements. Again, less important for you as the beginner, but the system needs to ask for the native dialogue or right after that screen shows. So we show up a screen that mimics what the actual operating system of either Android or iOS will look like. And we need to instruct the phone to do so. We need to swap out the text to match what the user expectations are to be met in this actual example, this copy here, like the words, will tell you when a person below That's customer. So we need to put that in there. Then we have metrics. For this example, this is really basic. It's like SPM and need to know how many users tap Allow, How many opt out.
5. Starting with a problem: Welcome to the section of starting with the problem. It's a common pitfall for product managers to think that they just are the idea guy or the idea girl. Now that's part of it, but it's a very small part of it. You're actually just trying to draw out the problems from your users and understand what's the biggest friction points. So if you're trying to get a live entertainer on-demand may be a big problem for new customers when they're getting started, is signing up. That might be a big problem. And it would be useless for you to go work on anything besides that because they didn't even get through the front door. So if you can identify oh, we have a problem with our sign-ups. We need to focus on our sign-ups. Well, you might have ten solutions there, but you spent more time figuring out what the problem was. So that when you actually came up with solutions and you started working with engineers and starting working with designers. You would know that the work that's going to be done is the most high impact work. And you'd have a much higher level of competence because you've spent the time up front studying the user behavior, understanding what the problem was. So again, we'll get into it as we cover the three concepts of Product Management, which are user experience, development and business. But I just want to just really drive it home that you want to stay in that problem space. It's so important. Over the last five years of helping build delivery deeds, I found myself continuously falling into that same pitfall where you come up with some insight and you say, wow, be cool. If we add, I saw what uber did. Uber has this thing where there's a light that is in the car and on the phone you have the cool red thing and you can change the color of the light so you identified, we should build that. And it's so easy to get caught up in the competitor focused, sexy new things that you totally forget that the big problem is just sign up and they couldn't even get to that part at the end. That's at the end of the customer lifecycle. So I'm really passionate about this stuff as you can tell, because I've just, I've lived it and I've I've helped people through getting into that problem space. Again, like I trained our whole organization too. Not just come up with solutions because that's not their job and that's not a customer's job. Your role as a product manager, the most important thing you can do is be able to identify problems and be able to work with customers and users to, to empathize and see-through what their complaints are. And then pull out the product. The product should be pulled out of the customer and you're laying down the track for what your roadmap will be in the future.
6. Business side of Product Management: Let's jump into the business side of things. Product managers are hired to set the direction of the product. It varies based on the scale of the company. If you went and worked at the Fan Company, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, or even Microsoft, Tesla. It's going to be way different there. So you might be a product manager on search within the Facebook Core app. There might be like seven product managers that are working on search. And there's a metric that's tied to each one. I didn't do that. I went the startup route. So for me I was a product manager on every product and I slowly built up a team, scaled the team, and then you start breaking apart and taking different features, different apps. So in this case, let's pretend like I'm the Product Manager on this live entertainment app for getting new customers on to the app. So I might have a metric that I'm following. And on the business side of things, I'm trying to get more transactions, more dollars in the bank for my company so we can scale, provide more value for customers and grow the business because we want to be able to get more engineers so we can create better features. So we can create, create more wealth for the entertainers and more experiences for those customers, as I mentioned before. So my metric will be conversion. It's one of the most common metrics in e-commerce for product managers to look at. Conversion is simply if you have 100 website or app visitors and 10 of them convert or do the goal that you want, they make a purchase, then you have a 10 percent conversion rate. And if you get 11 customers over a period of time, let's say one week. Because that's a common way to track this, then you have 11 percent conversion rate. So it all starts with kinda looking at the metrics, understanding the health of the business, one of the goals of the business. So in this e-commerce, entertainment, on-demand model, I want to take the business from doing 10 thousand transactions a month to 12 thousand transactions a month. And if I have a certain amount of traffic, let's say I have a 100 thousand people hitting my app every single month. Then I know that I need to get a 2% increase. I need to go from having 10 thousand customers to 12000 paying customers over that 30-day span. So you'll start with that and you say, okay, here's this awesome financial goal that I want to accomplish because I know if I get that extra 2000 customers through my funnel, which is the product. The steps that they take to go from signing up to looking around the app, to looking at an entertainer, to booking, to paying. If I can do that, that's a huge deal. A 2% swing on 2000 people that might shake out. I don't know how many dollars in this example, but it's a lot of dollars. So you would start there and that's when you're sitting down with analysts and understanding and you're crunching those numbers and you're trying to understand pen to paper in the Excel sheet, back a napkin. Maybe. What could this business metric if we moved it from X to Y, yield and results for the business. And then you have an awesome basis to go and start coming up with different ways of like, okay, here's this problem. I'm looking at our sign-up funnel for customers and there's a lot of fat in this step. I can see that of the a 100 thousand people that come in a month, I'm losing 5000. And the first step, they don't even get in the door, they open and they leave. Maybe there's a bug, maybe, maybe they want sign up with Facebook or Twitter or Google or I don't know. But that's a problem. And you can say to yourself, okay, well, I have a thesis. I think that we have a problem. Homepage. It's the lowest hanging fruit. I believe that if we make the change of putting in single-sign-on, that we can make impact there. And we're going to we're going to move the needle. We are going to upgrade at two points, whatever. But like that's kinda like where you would go on the business side of things just from a high beginner's level is start with some sort of metric goal. And you say to yourself, okay, we wanna accomplish this. Maybe we wanna know it could just be like a numerical goal around just transactions, not even with dollars. Like if you're launching something brand new, I want to get to 50 transactions. What do we need to do? Well, we need to get the thing functional, okay, what's functional means? And you kind of go through the motions of understanding what it is that we need to do. That's when you're collaborating with UX and you're coming up with sketches. And then going and working with developers, which we'll talk about in a second.
7. UX side of Product Management: Let's talk about user experience. Now. You've probably seen a bazillion, different YouTube videos or maybe you haven't about UX and UI and they kinda get coupled together. I think that there is a big issue because most people look at it and they say, Oh, your UX, UI, UI, UX guy or girl. Well, the thing is, is they're very different. And smaller scale organizations will lump them together because you would hope that that engineered or sorry, that designer can handle both. But user experience is what it sounds like. It's the experience that the customer has now in my world and the world that we're talking about, which is software user experience is what delights the customer, what the look is. It's really like what the feel of that experience is when you go into an app and you just seamlessly sign up and you get, maybe you're signing up for this live entertainment app. And you can just easily upload your Twitter photo and it pulls in your bio and it links in your Instagram photos and all of a sudden your profiles built for you. And you didn't have to do any work. You didn't have to think. You don't want to make people think that would be a simple example of a good experience would be for our customers that they just flowed through, tap, tap, tap that are in there's no work. Now UI, conversely would be 0. The drop shadow on that button looks nice. The aesthetic of the flow of the page was nice. The paint on top of the experience looked great. It's the aesthetic. Now there's a book that I recommend. It's called The Design of Everyday Things. It's the yellow book with the tea pot on it. And there's a great analogy in that book of a chair, and it just nails the UI UX things so well, where you would rather have, if you had two, you'd rather have a chair that's comfortable to sit in, but sucks to look at. Then a chair that sucks to sit in, but it is okay to look at. So the ability for you to sit in a chair and have a comfortable time would be the user experience. You sit in it, you enjoy it. You might recommend it to a friend that's called MPS. By the way, the UI would be what the chair looks like, the fabric, the thing that you walk in the house and you like, Oh, that looks nice, but then you sit in it and it's sucks, that's UX. So there's also another, I'll even image here, but there's a nice meme of UI UX where there's a pathway, a sidewalk around a grassy area, and everybody cuts the corner because it doesn't make sense for you to go up and around. The UI of it or the user experience is that of a 90 degree angle. But nobody wants to do that because it just doesn't make sense. If you're heading that direction, you need to get to your point over there. Well, how would I go like this and now when I can just go across, so you act would be like the cattle path that's created by the people that are walking across it. The best tip that I can have for you as an aspiring product manager is start shifting your mindset from just being a user of products to a student of products. Whenever you're using an application, try to sub, take yourself out of the subconscious and be more aware of what it is that's making you use that app. A pro tip is go ahead and look on your phone, check the usage. What are the apps that you use the most throughout your day? Maybe it's Twitter, maybe it's Snapchat, maybe it's the call meditation app. I'm not sure everybody's different, but what I do know is that you'll be able to study those apps. And it's not like you have to go in with a pen and paper and write things down. But as you're using them, just consciously make an effort to ask yourself, what is it about this application that's making me come back? What is it that's making? I'm looking for this book because this book is actually phenomenal for them. Hooked, book recommendation linked down below. What is it that's making me the consumer circle back and how the habit of using this thing over and over when I signed up, it was so easy when I wanted to meditate again. I didn't think about it because the experience I had before was so good such that it's just a part of my day now. And it's tricky to create a product out of nothing that cuts into somebody's day because everybody's busy. But you need to start just re-framing the way that you use your apps every day. And to the point where eventually you can be just taking screenshots of delightful experiences. That's what I do all the time. I have a bazillion photos on my photo gallery that literally just show photos of apps. It's like a swipe file. There's a website called mobbing dot design, MLB BIN dot design. That's the URL. And it's just a library of UI patterns for mobile apps. So you can go and see every food delivery app, every entertainment app, every meditation app, every banking app. You can understand what is it that these things are doing? Why was it that the Chase app for banking was so easy? Why is it that I use Venmo over Cash App or vice versa? And notice those things and try to apply them to your own sketches when you're coming up with ideas. The last recommendation within UX is checkout, the human interface guidelines by Apple. And just, it's kind of like the home for a lot of different rules around design. Now, when you're new to product management, you don't need to be an amazing designer at all. I was lucky that I had to learn it before because the company needed it. So I went product designer to product manager, to VP product. But if you're going to be a great advantage, if you can just know the basics of design. So studying the human interface guidelines by Apple, little things like understanding how large a button should be for your finger pad. Think it's like 44 pixels or something. But just knowing these kind of guidelines that have been tested, their psychology behind it, you're going to be way more educated when you go and collaborate with designers because that's what you're doing. You're filling in the whitespace, coming up with how this thing will all work. You want to understand how to work with the team to actually build it and execute it. Later on, you'll want to go pen and paper and start actually drawing up some ideas that's called wireframing. And then if you're really into it, this is a beginners course, but you'd go into Figma, and I don't want to go and teach you Figma, but there's a free, free UI design tool where you can go and learn and there's plenty of wireframing kits. There.
8. Development side of Product Management: Development is, in my opinion, the most crucial part, product management. If you can get your engineers aligned with design and yourself, you're going to thank yourself because the power of a great engineering team is absolutely insane. My definition Attack, which I stole from Peter Teal, is doing more for less. And that's the beauty of software. If you can look at a process and you can turn it into software, you can scale it. That's the reason a company like Zapier will be worth billions of dollars is because it just takes processes, gives you a GUI or graphical user interface to automate things. And then you no longer have to have that manual process of foot on the ground, boots on the ground. Without engineers, you're just making static designs that can't actually do anything. That, that's the reality. You'll have a white paper or a PRD product requirement document and a design and nothing to show besides that. So you need them on your team and you need to bring them in as early as possible when you're writing a product requirement document, which I'll go through and show you how I think about it and all of the section you want to bring them in once you've done the first draft of it and you want to bring in the engineers that are excited, collaborate. Most engineers don't want to just be handed a spec and say, hey, go build this. See you Friday. That's sucks. No engineer likes that. Maybe like some engineered like just likes to be a soldier, but it being collaborative makes this job so much more fun where it doesn't feel like a job. He literally making something out of nothing. And it goes out to the world and it's not like, like that's why I love product management because it's not like glasses where I'm like, okay, like I got to spin up a factory and we pay from plastic and glass and got to pay for the employees. It's like no, you bake, you bake this little product, you put it out in the world. It scales infinitely. It like no extra cost, marginal costs, server costs like a dollar. So like getting those engineers on your side and bringing them in early is so essential because they will think of things that you never thought of and they're going to be so excited to collaborate. And then when they go do the actual work, they're going to love it because they were a part of that. You weren't just again, Hanuman spec. So as a PM, you're not necessarily the CEO of everything like he can't be that guy or that girl. It's like we're doing it this way because I'm the guy or girl. That's not going to make, it's not gonna fly. You're going to just make people upset. So bring them in. There's an excellent example, Mark Pincus who started Zynga, if you remember, Farmville and there's like poker games, all those games that are on Facebook now, there's apps. He used to do this thing where he just do hackathons and he'd say, Hey everybody, like go work on whatever you want to do. But if we can use it for our company that the great We own it. But just somehow just go work on when we want to work on. And he walked past somebody's desk. There was a dad and he had made a cow that was walking, literally just cow ahead. Mark Pincus had always wanted to have a farm. You walk past him. He just had this insight. He's like, oh my gosh, can we make a farm out of that with a bunch of cows, eat the grass and we'll make a game. Boom, Farmville multi-million dollar company off the back of a hackathon where an engineer is empowered to Romano zone do what he wanted. Another example, there's an agency that I actually work with called crema. It's a product agency. They do every Friday for a year. I think they do it every Friday, but like, it took him a year of taking every Friday off to work on their own stuff. And they scale, they built a product from scratch that's like a water planting app. And they sold it for like $23 million or something. That goes news just off the back of engineers like wanting to build something. It's also your job as a product manager to align with the engineers such that you have a reasonable timeline for things. That's always tricky because if the engineers haven't actually built a thing before, their level of accuracy won't be that hard or that accurate because it's something that they've never done. So that also is part of and a tell of a great engineer. A great engineer look at something and be really good at estimating it or there'll be not so good at estimating it. So someone can be really good at coding, but really bad at estimating. And it's kind of on you as a product manager, as you're working with more engineers. So just see out like who's realistic with their timelines. And it's just really something that comes with experience of just running in the game was like, Okay, this guy always underestimates and then works crazy hours to hit deadlines and then there's burnt-out. So you want to be realistic with it. That's again, this is beginner's course. I don't want to get too into it, but that's pretty much it on engineering. Actually. Last tip. It does pay quite literally like if we had paid more, but it just with your personal experience to learn a little bit more about programming than your average PM. So if you can just learn a little bit of front end dev, just the concepts of it you should understand like how tech works, like, how like conceptually Instagram works where it deals with a server and then serves the images up and it doesn't load them all at the same time. And server-side rendering versus client-side rendering. There's just like some, some stuff that's good to know. Like for instance, I know HTML, CSS, some JavaScript, some react, some Next JS, some mobile dev. And then like how APIs work, you don't need to know all that. But if you can just scratch the surface on like, oh, I kind of get like how the Internet works like the more you now basically.
Parker Rex, Creator, Startup Founder
