After returning from abroad in 2015, I chose to join a startup company as a product manager. In the past two years, I have experienced numerous demands at large and small scales, and accompanied the ups and downs of the company all the way up to now. Product managers, as one of the first business strategy makers, play an important role in the initial start-up process. Based on my previous entrepreneurial experience in trading platforms in North America, I will roughly analyze what role product managers should play in start-up companies.

  • Know how to define products and the business logic behind them;

  • Know how to explore product solutions and identify product opportunities;

  • Will push forward the project, do a good job of product life cycle management;

  • Have a strategic vision of the product and give the product line.

I.

The first two points can be said together, mainly about the product view and business thinking of product managers.

Defining products

When I started my own business, the first thing I did when I decided to be a product manager was define my product. I did this because I had clear business goals early in the project: to validate the idea and evaluate the business opportunity of the product. So I’m not looking for visuals for my MVP product, I’m looking for my ability to integrate and explore the strategic business model, product architecture, target audience, etc. from a deep understanding of user needs and turn MVP into AN MVBP product.

After clarifying my business goals and work goals, the first step is to determine a reasonable product demand that meets the development requirements of the company. This is a time to test the judgment of a product manager, because with the progress of the project, there will be more and more sources of product demand, such as:

  • My target audience;

  • Competitors’ paying customers;

  • Analyze reports and trend charts through industry analysis;

  • Advice from the company’s investors and, if you’re not the founder, perhaps the company’s top brass;

  • Product development team;

  • The company’s business related team, such as operations, marketing, sales, etc.

  • The product manager’s own empirical intuition about the market and technology.

At this time, as a product manager, the most important thing is to evaluate the information with product value and commercial value, determine which information is the most suitable product demand in the current environment of the company, and sort out the product demand document for joint development with the technical team.

Product solutions, and product opportunities to make a judgment

After determining the product requirements that are reasonable and in line with the development requirements of the company, the product manager needs to explore solutions on this basis. This includes basic product features and functions, major business logic, UI design, interactive experience, and so on. Then write the PRD document (product requirements document) and complete this part with the low-fidelity product prototype. On top of that is the ability to assess and control product opportunities.

An opportunity assessment can provide two very valuable outputs.

1. Decide which ideas to abandon

Through sorting out the needs, I will get many better ideas and better product opportunities. But given the fundamentals of the company and the cost of time given to the market, there may be a number of practical reasons during which a qualified product manager needs to keep in mind what the business goals of the company are.

Perhaps the scale of demand is insufficient; Or they don’t have viable technical capabilities right now; Or that doesn’t fit with your team or the company itself; Or any other reason. All of these factors can affect a product manager’s judgment of the product.

At this time, the value that the product manager needs to reflect is to prevent the company from wasting time and resources in this unworthy place. Therefore, for a product manager, it is not necessary to do something. It is also a very valuable job to know what not to do.

2. Add a commercial element to the product value

When you get a very precious opportunity for product, and the time is right, you believe that your team can provide a very effective product solutions, as a product manager at this time the key is to identify how to win in the market, at the same time let management or investors will also learn about what the company is about to enter a market.

summary

The product manager’s mind is not limited by the resources currently available and the circumstances of today’s market. They describe opportunities for disruptive innovations and make specific plans for how to implement them.

Product managers are able to predict the approximate revenue of a project and can effectively draw on past experience and use comparable benchmarks. They also calculate the revenue once the project is launched and use the lessons learned for future product development process optimization and forecasting.

The product manager does not have to be a designer, but can appreciate “good design” and distinguish “good design” from “good design”. They should also be able to articulate the differences between their fellow designers, or at least the direction to go from “good design” to “great design.”

II.

After a specific and feasible product solution is explored, a lot of feasibility communication will be conducted with the R&D team until the requirement review is passed, the requirements are encapsulated and the r&d status is entered. Listen to the suggestions of each team member and convince them to accept your final plan. As the project progresses, you will often play different roles and take on many unexpected responsibilities. Do a good job of product management at this time.

In the current market environment, product management is first responsible for the target, the value of the product target is to identify and grasp the opportunity. The art of product management is to combine your deep understanding of the needs and expectations of your target audience with the technical capabilities of the R&D team to define a persuasive and feasible product and push the project forward. Therefore, the product manager is the person who stands at the intersection of contradictions and should be the best person on the team to deal with information asymmetry.

In the vast majority of companies I’ve seen, including teams I’ve worked on, product managers don’t directly manage any of the professionals who are actually involved in the product building process. Programmers work for technical directors, designers work for creative directors, and testers work for quality control leaders, which means it’s almost impossible for product managers to lead teams by administrative means.

As the owner of the product requirements, you can influence the product in many ways by writing the requirements, but you quickly discover that many decisions affecting the product do not belong to the product manager. In this case, the product manager must know how to do product management. Of course, making products is a dynamic process of constantly discovering and solving problems, so maintaining efficient communication and promoting project progress is always the responsibility of implementing products.

Product management is important because there is a very basic principle of testing and balancing gains and losses when the product manager has to convince and push the team. For a startup project, product managers need to present objective facts, not executive orders.

If it was a very strong startup team, the product manager would have gained more valuable information by brainstorming with colleagues in technology, operations, testing, r&d, and marketing. This process can lead to more different professional perspectives, or it can force you to think more deeply and then move on to the next step with a stronger reason.

In the current Internet environment, the high risk of interconnected products determines that it is extremely dangerous to promote directly by administrative orders. Therefore, the objectivity conveyed by the product manager himself is very important to the success of the project, and this objectivity can only be guaranteed through deep thinking about the product route.

III.

Often a connected product iterates and grows, so when I think of the word “product,” I mean all versions of the product. The product manager is also responsible for the evolution of the product process over time. The starting point for this responsibility is to define the zero iteration of a product.

The zero Iteration

The first duty of the product manager is to make the right things happen, and the right things happen only when the product direction is chosen. The first time a product manager changes and filters requirements is called iteration zero. The premise is that you have to know your product and your audience well enough to make the right judgment.

It involves a whole set of ways of thinking, and the decisions that most affect a product and determine its final shape are often made in the early days of the team. To be a good product manager you must always think differently about what you are going to do next. In this mode of thinking, the most terrible thing is the obsession with user experience. I have seen countless products with excellent user experience fail to survive, and I have also seen many products with poor user experience cling to a demand for continuous iteration and finally grow.

Some product managers are obsessed with user feedback and don’t think deeply about what they really want to express behind it. When users are unhappy with a product, but can’t explain exactly why, they tend to attribute their dissatisfaction to a lot of small and trivial features: they ask for a lot of features, a lot of experience improvements, and it doesn’t matter if the product actually solves the problem. In the operation system, my friends often told me that data operation is not to study the results brought by these numbers, but to study the behavior of people reflected behind the data.

If the post-product work such as promotion and operation is excluded, the process of making product decisions in the early stage of project establishment is generally as follows:


Most product managers, especially in large companies, spend their primary work on technology implementation and user experience, because strategic direction thinking and adjustment is made by higher managers in the team. But even without decision-making power, it makes sense to think strategically about the need for product requirements. This will allow you to make better decisions and identify problems to solve, which is important because:

(1) The best thing a product team should know is: What’s next?

For example, after the first big version of the product is finished, what happens next? Or have our products actually improved over time to meet growing market demand? In addition to capturing the team’s attention with this information, clarifying the product’s strategy and release plan gives the team a sense of direction. Especially in startup projects, we often have to compromise on what goes live depending on the timing of the market, but if the team has a very clear idea that the features they’ve completed are scheduled for a later release, the sunk cost for the team is very low.

(2) Improve the work efficiency of the R&D team

When technical teams are faced with very rich product decisions, product managers need to help them maximize the architectural aspects of the product from an evolutionary perspective. It’s obviously better to give the team as much information as possible as early as possible, rather than risk making major changes later. As a product manager, the ability to give the technical team as much of a sense of the overall picture of the product as possible in advance is critical to mobilizing the technical potential. This is especially true in the early stages of a startup.

(3) Insert a sharp knife into the project

Keeping sales and marketing informed about where the product is going helps them to be more informative when communicating with customers and some industry analysts. At the user operation level, early seed users always hope to get the next trend of the product in advance. If some seed users can be included in the role of product design in the early stage, it will reduce a lot of new cost in the later market operation level.

Once the product manager has provided such a clear and convincing product blueprint of where the product is going, these processes should be expressed in a product roadmap (or version tree) — what capabilities and key release content should the product have when? What value does each release provide to the market? The details of these contents will be reflected in the specific product Requirements Document (PRD) for each release along this direction.

The product manager is responsible not only for the strategic direction, but also for these steps and for the context of product evolution. The product strategy and roadmap should reflect the input and support of the entire product team and should be reviewed and approved by company management or presentations to investors.

IV.

For the early stages of a project whether it’s in a startup or in a division under the group. The importance of product manager is obvious, it gives the soul and tonality of products, and plays a pivotal role in the future development of products. In this era when everyone is a product manager, it is the goal of every product manager to have the thinking and skills of a product manager, and to be able to independently promote product strategic planning and product life cycle management.

The above is my opinion on what kind of product manager start-up companies need. If it is helpful to you after reading it, please pay attention to my column. I will share more thoughts and feelings about products here.