Importance of A Holistic Product Function in A Startup
The role of a Product Owner/Manager/Strategist is to help startups capture and transform customer insights into full product experiences that in turn increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention, and the business values. Product Management in an inter-disciplinary role which tries to marry Business strategy and Marketing with Design and Engineering, hence making better products that users need.
Having a well-built Product function offers business startups the advantages such as setting up of business objectives, targeting markets to deliver measurable products and services, and prioritizing the goals of the company. Parallel to having Engineering or Development teams, technology startups today have dedicated Product teams, which encapsulate Product Management, Product Design, Product Analytics and Product Marketing functions within them, with each of these functions having specific purposes they fulfill.
Structure of Product and Engineering Teams
The Product team helps drive all the product related decisions, working in tandem with the Business and Engineering teams as well as understanding the needs of users in order to prioritize various product modules. In short, this is the team that drives the Product Roadmap of the company, managing the Product Releases according to customer expectations and businesss goals.
Product Team Roles and Responsibilities
The cross-functional role of Product Management ensures that any product feature or module that is being designed and developed is in-line with the broader Business goals of the company, and also follows a User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology which puts the end-users at the center of what is being developed.
1. Product Management:
- Working with Business teams to create a Product Strategy and Roadmap
- Market requirement specifications and Analysis
- Understanding of user personas and problems faced by customers
- Competitor Analysis of other players in the same industry to understand how they are solving similar problems
- Creation of use-case lists, along with the mapping of user journeys across various modules of the product
- Working closely with Design and Development teams on product proof-of-concepts
- Mixpanel and Google Analytics events and properties listing to create a holistic product usage analytics funnel
- Agile Sprints and Release planning for each module
2. Product Design:
- Product requirement specifications
- Validation of user personas and problems faced by customers
- Use-case scenarios and user journey mapping
- Revisiting Design and Information Architecture of the entire platform
- Wireframing and low fidelity iterations of Design of each of the modules
- High fidelity User Interfaces and User Experience Design
- Design elements and icons for development
- Creation of a unified UI Style guide and UX practices across modules
- Usability Testing and enhancements, whenever and wherever necessary
- UX Enhancements based on Analytics
3. Product Analytics:
- Mixpanel event listing and analysis of product usage
- Google Analytics (GA) strategy for sales conversions
- Full Story/Heap/Segment.com session analysis to measure user behavior
- AB Testing and UX Enhancements based on data
- Product/UX Health Dashboards (read about this here)
4. Product Marketing:
- New User Onboarding
- Placement of Product and Product Messaging
- Product Documentation
- Customer Retention and Share of Voice
- Working with the Marketing and Sales teams for product positioning and branding
- Email Marketing Workflows
Product Operations:
At a Strategic and planning level, the Product Owners/Managers (PM’s) come up with the Product Vision and Strategy in the long and short terms, keeping in mind the Go-to-market (GTM) Strategy of the Business teams and the Customer Success (CS) Strategy that puts the end-consumers in the spotlight.
1. Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy
The role of the PM here is to clearly understand the revenue targets of the business, how to achieve them in the next 2–3 years, which market segments to go after, and what needs to be done to be successful in those segments. To do so, the activities of the PM include:
a. Marketing Focus
b. Pipeline Requirement Analysis
c. Win-Loss Analysis
2. Customer Success (CS) Strategy
The role of the PM here is to understand the requirements of the users, how to convert new users into repeat paying customers, and what levers to rely on in order to grow the existing customer accounts. To do so, the activities of the PM include:
a. Upsell Strategy (upgrade, expand, replace)
b. User Retention
c. Customer Excellence
3. Product Strategy
Based on the above goals, the PM creates a Product Strategy, which includes things like — how to become the №1 player in the market segment or product category, how to align the market influencers towards our approach to solving the problem, what is our time to market, etc. To do so, the activities of the PM include:
a. Market Requirement Documentation
b. Competitor Positioning
c. Analysis of Buyer and User personas and Problems to go after
d. Analysis of Share of Voice (how consumers perceive the product)
4. Product Roadmap
Based on the Product Strategy, a quarterly and an annual product roadmap is made for the company by the PM. A product roadmap gives a broad overview of all aspects of an upcoming product: goals, timeline, features, resources, etc. The roadmap indicates what a design/development team is building, the problem the technology or software will solve, and the business goals the new product will achieve. But an effective roadmap will also serve as a project management tool in two main ways:
a. It is a strategic tool where you can make forward-looking objectives and rough timelines for your product.
b. It can improve communication by providing a place where multiple stakeholders can weigh in on product goals and progress.
Based on the Product Roadmap, design and development sprints are planned in an agile manner with weekly or biweekly targets. Tools like Asana or Jira can be used for the same.
5. Steps in Product Design and Development:
a. Problem Discovery
b. Requirement Gathering
c. Requirement Analysis
d. Requirement Specifications
e. Use Cases and Scenarios
f. Information Architecture/Wireframing
g. UI/UX Design
h. Design Specifications
i. Task planning
j. Development
k. Quality Assurance/Testing
l. PM Sign-off
m. Product Module Release
The goal here is to build agile, scalable, data-driven, user centered products for the next generation. As a Product Owner/Designer/Manager/Strategist, I help startups capture and transform customer insights into full product experiences that in turn increase customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty and brand love.
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