How to document like a pro being a product manager?
Tools & tips that will help you with a good system and methods for documentation.
When you work as a product manager, soon enough you realize that most of your time is consumed by meetings, communicating with analytics, developers, stakeholders, designers, business analyst etc, etc. When you find some time sitting by your desk you spend it documenting all the actions, decisions, design etc. We as product people know that it’s in everyone’s best interest to document everything but we don’t want to spend too much time & effort in it. Luckily for us, there are people out there creating tools for which we as product managers are the end users, and they are trying really hard to make our life easier as much as possible.
If you are new to product management take this as a piece of advice that people can ask you for a year old decision log or documents belonging to the medieval age of your product, which you might have to produce in short notice for some current decisions. You don’t want to stress over finding a document. I have learned that there are 100’s of different forms of documentation that we need to produce. The age of folders and spending time organizing every document alphabetically or some naming system is gone. Here is the list of tools, along with the method which I find is very helpful in any situation.
Use Confluence & Jira together
Confluence and Jira together are like a knife and fork, they can be used individually but using them together will make it so much easier.
Everything is organized at one single place. Often before I used to struggle with having the big picture, vision, and roadmap connected to detailed tasks or user stories to give them context and show the progress. But with the combination of confluence and jira together I now write the high-level requirement, provide context, connect our roadmap in confluence along with the detailed user stories and task that I write in JIRA. Use proper hierarchy structure to link all the task to all the user stories, to all the epics to the initiative to all the opportunities to our roadmap.
All the updates are done at once. Once any ticket is in progress or blocked or closed the status can be seen in all your linked documents, in your roadmap or requirement document and in all the places you have linked for status updates. One change will be reflected everywhere without having to update it manually or risking to miss any place to update.
Version history provides a good overview. In the big organization, the challenges are to see if someone else has done some changes in the requirement document, track and monitor all the change owners. For this, the version history overview is a life saver. You can see who made the changes, and what changes did they make. With this now I create only one document with all the requirements, changes, updates, user feedback and re-work.
Linking makes reading easy. You can link the Jira issues to the confluence document to provide the context or vice versa to provide the work status update on the initiative. It's so easy to keep everyone on the same page and provide the same context for thinking and decision making.
Use the comment section in JIRA wisely for documenting nitty gritty on the issue. When you ask everyone to document the discussions, next steps, tag the responsible person in the comment it gets easy to follow the issue for everyone on the team. Even if some people aren't involved in the discussion can follow through it when needed.
Use video recording for demos
Before, giving demos to stakeholders was always messy work. The test costumer didn’t work, maybe the test slot was down or something technical issues occurred while demoing wasting all of our time, making me nervous and evoking a discussion not even related to the demo. Now, I have started to record the demo with the help of my tester. My demo meetings are as short as 30 mins. No delays, as I play the recording and add some explanation if needed. Everyone in the room understands what we are going to release and if for some reason any stakeholder wants to see the demo later we have it available on our wiki release document for them to have a look at it at their leisure. The tool I use for recording the demos is SnagIT which is free and easy to use.
Ask for interactive designs from your UX team.
Whenever starting a new feature or designing a slightly bigger use case try to ask for interactive designs from your UX designer. There are multiple benefits to having an interactive design. The most important one is the UX’er will start to think about all the ‘what if’ situation, creating a much better solution to a negative flow rather than just focusing on the positive flow. Second is when you present it to stakeholder is much easier and will have less question and faster approval. In the case of multiple stakeholders, who couldn't attend the meetings all at once you can send the link to your new design explain the use cases and get the approval without delays.
Interactive designs also help with faster user testing. When in doubt and you have interactive designs you can just walk around and do some rapid effective guerrilla testing and get quick feedback on your design. You can do testing with just drawings on a piece of paper of course but this way is more effective even for the users to participate.
Use google slides or google docs if you must.
I understand that sometimes we need powerpoint presentation and or word documents but instead of making it in MS office and sending dozens of versions back and forth it is much easier to use the online documents. All the edits are in one place, no need of saving a document in your computer. The search function is way better to find a document on google docs than in our computers. Multiple people can work or access the same document at the same time and the updates are real time.
For KPI’s I personally use google sheets along with google slides or google docs and the integration make it very easy for updates in multiple places with the single change. I have one sheet for KPI’s which my analyst has configured in such way that it gets automatically updated monthly, I have these numbers shown in different ways, charts & diagrams at multiple other documents and they get automatically updated just with one refresh. Monthly updates of KPI’s is no more a tedious task.
I have seen people maintaining word documents for requirements, changes, decisions, multiple excel sheets for different kinds of numbers, ppt versions after every meeting and truly speaking I was impressed with how talented these people were in maintaining and organizing their documents, but I always thought what a waste of skills. If they could do it more efficiently they could use their time and skills into creating much better systems or features.
Use your time wisely as there is a huge difference between doing the right job, and doing the job right. Be the ones who realize the difference value and waste.
