Tribute to The Microsoft PowerPoint
Product Managers Most Useful Tool
Not slides
This story is not about the importance of good slides or slides in their usual context at all. If you need to make kickass slides you might be better of avoiding MS Powerpoint altogether. So whats Microsoft PowerPoint good for then? Its seems that for about everything else. If I must choose only one tool to take to a remote island as a PM, I would take MS PowerPoint (I also would try to sneak in MS Excel, but that's another story).
Flow charts
There is a ton of different tools out there for flow charts. Your company probably has a UML modelling tool such as Enterprise Architect or Gliffy that the developers and architects use but when you just need a quick and hassle-free way to jolt down a process during a meeting then PowerPoint is my weapon of choice.
It has all the shapes, lines and arrow types one would need to either explain anything or make notes when someone is explaining something to you. As a product manager, you probably need to have at least a high-level understanding of how your product works in the backend. Because of PowerPoint not being designed specifically for flow charts or UML diagrams, it does not have any built-in ‘right way’ restrictions or needs (for example to have a Project or place where to make your scribblings or how many arrows you can have pointing at an oval shape). You can add all the notes, comments and colour code as you wish.
Image manipulation
Crop, resize, crop to shape, rotate. Change colour tone, saturation or recolour. Just paste your image into PowerPoint and as long as you don't care much about the actual dimensions or formats you are good to go with 90% of product managers image processing needs. If you need to draw something from scratch, PowerPoint also helps to keep your stuff aligned and equally spaced.
I have made placeholder ghetto logos for some of the experimental projects and visuals for some of my previous Medium stories and also featured image for this one.
Everybody can design, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! If the result is crap, at least it's yours and you have a new better feeling and understanding about what is actually means to design something.
Design mocks
Screens, buttons, input fields, menus. Most of the UI elements are rectangular and follow the box model. PowerPoint is excellent with boxes so it's also super easy to create mocks there. Maybe your designer has already left the office but the development team needs at least some designs NOW or maybe you don't even have a designer (yet). Whatever the case, you as a product manager must bring the chestnuts out of the fire. You probably have no ‘edit’ access to the team Figma, Marvel or InVision account but you have a powerful alternative. If you want to explain your point based on existing UI just take a screenshot and paste it into PowerPoint. You can hide elements with shapes, create new buttons, texts etc and save it all (right-click save as picture) again as a picture and share it with the team.
Or you can just create mocks from scratch, additionally PowerPoint has an adequate library of icons and ‘smart art’.
Level 2 is that you can make your mocks clickable and use them for UX-testing.
Videos
Yes, you read right, videos. Remember these annoying slide transitions and effects that were popular in the wild early days of presentations? I don't know what kind of a PM thought these were a priority feature or if all the other challenges in the presentation scene were already solved. But these millions that went into the development of all the Swivels, Bounces, Loops and Fly-ins come handy when you need to animate something. Now, this is anywhere near easy or user-friendly. But if you don't have time to look for or budget to use dedicated tools for creating animated videos and you have very basic needs, then you can probably get away with MS PowerPoint.
If you don't believe me, here's one example you can download as a PPTX file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3WWyvuC_Vy9TlFUU1NrcGxKX2c/view?usp=sharing and same presentation exported to a video on Youtube:
Fake demos
If you combine mocks with videos you’ll get a fake demo. Fake door experiments and Wizard of OZ testing are some of the methods PM’s use to validate solutions on real users before the development even begins. But if you don't even have a web site or GUI to run any of these fake it till you make it tests then you have to go even cheaper. You can add animations to your PowerPoint mocks and then record the ‘movement’ as an interaction. It would even look more real if you would use clickable PowerPoint mocks and record mouse or touchscreen interactions.
Microsoft PowerPoint is sort of like product managers. PM-s can do a bit of everything if needed but you should not really use anything PM has created in the production.
