Finest-5 Product reads #43
Product discovery, Notifications, Facebook PM, etc..
Hi,
Apologies for missing the Sunday. I finally took my longest (5 days) vacation. A suggestion, if you are anywhere near Vellore-India, do definitely visit the golden temple. It’s pure beauty.
Back to business. We all saw a great example of unshipping this week, with Instagram removing the shopping page. Unshipping is something most product managers do not care about and thus making a bulky tool with distractions.
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Product Discovery ≠ Ideation
If I pick 10 PMs and ask to define discovery, half of them will respond by saying, brainstorming to ideate the best possible solution. And sticking to it leads to a world where most solutions are constantly rejected after building.
Key Takeaways:
There are multiple parts to product discovery: business strategy, customer understanding, solutions, and testing
The time invested in aligning and communicating your business strategy pays for itself many times over
The goal during testing is to test your high potential solutions with the smallest possible investment.
How PMs Should Build a Great Product Notification Experience
Everyone fears the notifications. As a PM, you are scared to not overdo or underdo it and as a user you are afraid of your phones constantly beeping because some PMs think notifications are free, send as many as they can.
Key Takeaways:
You could use any notification channel for both transactional and marketing purposes, but some are more suited to one or the other
The key aspects that contribute to a good notification experience: Right channels, Right timing, Right customizations and preferences, Following platform best practices.
Test your notifications the same way as you test the rest of your product, to ensure that they are functional and look good.
How Facebook does Product Management
Every company has a different JD for a PM. Some PMs are doing strategy, some are project managers,and some are just lost. A deeper look at Facebook can be an example of what works.
Key Takeaways:
Facebook observed from their data that users who added 7 friends in 10 days were more engaged with the product than those who did not.
Value and Viability is with PMs, Feasibility is with Engineers, Usability is with Designers
Engineers @ Facebook do execution management towards milestones once the roadmap has been prioritised together with PMs. Therefore, PMs @ Facebook rarely end up creating stories/tasks:
Presentation skills for Product Managers
Presentations may look like an affair of big meetings. However, if we look a little closer, a PM frequently presents his ideas, solutions, prioritizations.
Key Takeaways:
You’ll need to balance being unpredictable and messy. If people can always predict what’s coming up next, think about how you might make your presentation more unpredictable.
People like hearing things in threes. Start by listing 3 key takeaways you’d like your audience to take from the presentation and structure your presentation around those key takeaways.
One way to keep your audience engaged is to plant seeds of curiosity at the start of your presentation by opening a loop and not closing it.
Problem Discovery for Calm SaaS Businesses
Calm businesses are the ones that are not mission critical, though they solve an important and urgent problem, still they are not do-or-die problems.
Key Takeaways:
If you tackle a do-or-die problem for your customers, their stress levels in ensuring things keep working become your stress levels.
There are four distinct kinds of problem indicators that you can find in communities: complaints, cries for help, requests for recommendations, and requests for alternatives.
Every single instance of a problem, there is a pain. And those pains look a lot alike. Here are three types of pain to look out for: time pain, resource pain, and pain of the self.
Product of the week: Smartcue
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