A Day In the Life of a Product Manager

Getting up super early, Marjory K'Ting rushed her breakfast of extra strong coffee and a bagel so that she could catch the red-eye commuter train to Doontung where they were holding today's consumer workshops for the Zeting shopper app, MyWay. 

On the way she read through the latest KPI scores for the current version app. It was showing good overall trends, though she noticed that one of the target segments, for young professionals was not responding as expected to the app. What was going on here then?

On arrival she headed straight to the KafMeUp coffeeshop whose owners had agreed to let them run their workshop in am area set to one side.  There she found Zak, her super keen intern assistant lounging around outside just as KafMeUp's proprieter Ivan Blunt arrived to open up.

Inside they started to set up at their reserved area with signs inviting passersby to drop in and participate in exchange for a free breakast, paid for by Zeting. As they were doing this, Gordan Keek, one of the developpers and Susan Chain (the retail specialist) turned up and started to fill up on pick-me-up sized mugs of coffee.

Just as set up was complete, and KafMeUp's staff were ready to open up, the first customers came in. Zak's role was to meet and greet the customers and invite representative members of the public to take part in the workshop. Arty Tariq, the lead tester then arrived and joined the group, panting heavily as his train had been delayed and he had run all the way from the station to get there on time.

Gordan was their to demonstrate the current prototype for the next release of the MyWay app. Arty would capture their responses, helping refine detailed requirements, design features, usability concerns and identify appropriate test cases.

Marjory and Susan were going to review the current user experience, focusing on a couple of scenarios which had recently been identified as priorities from customer feedback. Before she started, she asked the team to see if they could explore the young professional segment issue as well.

By mid morning, they were exhausted. They had spoken to 50 or so shoppers and office workers who stopped by the coffee shop on their way to work and had a pile of material to analyse. In the taxi, on the way back, Marjory spoke to the team and got their gut feel response from the morning's work. Overall, it seemed that the work had confirmed a lot of their initial research and assumptions, but that there was a perception problem around the app with young professional who did not feel that it catered to their ethical concerns or help with finding green sourced and sustainable products. Also there was a lack of coverage of certain classes of lifestyle service and product which they liked.

She was going to have to address that soon. Which meant another meeting with the solution architect, the analyst and the project manager to see what could traded against these new requirements. Arriving at the office she quickly called up her diary and scheduled a meeting to discuss how to accommodate this within the forthcoming release.

Slipping down to lunch in the nearby deli-cum-eatery she started to think through the implications. Retailing would need to research and add lines. She would have to update the targeting and messaging of the marketing campaign for the new release. The media company used would need re-briefing and she would probably have to present an update to the Integrated Product Team and then she would have to re-forecast the numbers for the current release's performance, the costs of the new release and the anticipated uptake and revenue for the re-defined release. The product road map would also need updating and Oh! she needed to do a quick first impressions adjustment to the forecasts for this afternoon's operating plan review with the CFO and the CMO.

A few adrenalin filled  hours later she had, survived the monthly operating plan review, but with new actions to confirm her gut feel projections with more definitive estimates. Although, it was not all bad, if they met the young professional consume segment's needs and got the message through to them, then there could be a revenue boost of anywhere between 10 and 30%. They just needed to execute well.

Back to planning again, she added all her new tasks to her to do list and went downstairs to see what was going on in the Integrated Product Team's End of Day wash-up. Progress was good, and most of the issues raised appeared to have a doable action, but the bad news was that young Kendra, their graduate app developer had accepted a job offer from GitYrRox and would be leaving next month. 

Now she just had to survive the evenings drinks at the local cocktail bar whilst the ceremonially on boarded the new operations team lead Justin into the team and took pictures of him wearing a funny hat for the internal magazine. She hurriedly, phoned to leave a voicemail for her partner, asking him to leave a snack out for when she got home later that night and headed off into the social fray. ...

This is a mythical story about a product manager in an integrated product team. The aim is to convey a little of what is involved, but also how important collaboration is across the end-to-end process of developing and delivering products, whilst innovating iteratively in a customer focused manner. It's all part of The Way of DAU

Integrated Product Teams - Digital Organisation

IPTs Are Not as New As You Think

I first came across the Integrated Product Team concept in the most traditional of environments, the Defence Industry. Their adoption was one of the major hallmarks of an attempt to revolutionise UK MoD procurement in recent times.

Benefits of IPTs

The best aspect of the IPTs, was not just that they were multi-disciplinary and therefore great at surfacing all the dimensions of a problem, but they also helped break down the barriers of distrust that exist in the Defence Industry. This is highly significant because, the industry has traditionally had a huge gulf separating the MoD and its contractors, due to the insecurity that is encouraged by the Treasury in its pursuit for what it thinks is Value For Money. The Treasury usually takes the stance that the costs are too high and the public sector is being ripped off by rapacious private sector companies, encouraging a general sense of insecurity in the public servants (in the MoD) who are dealing with them. This then leads to relationship problems and behaviours which inevitably stretch out acquisition projects, impact the quality of what is acquired and often results in increased costs. It is a situation which Demming (one of the grandfathers of the Total Quality Movement) would have predicted. As he advocated focusing on quality (driven by customer needs) and continuous improvement, with the philosophy that improved costs and value would follow.

Design Thinking And Agile

The concept of Design Thinking (see for example the UK Design Council's Double Diamond Model for product development) also relies on a similar multi-functional teams to get at what is the real customer problem to address, and then what is the most appropriate product design option for delivering it, supported by iterative design and prototyping to develop a right quality product.

So it is no surprise that the Agile Movement, building on traditional Rapid Application Development techniques of user-centric prototyping, has gradually moved to a Product Team based approach, particularly when the market driven influences of digital companies such as Amazon and Google are taken into account.

IPT Case Study

So I was really interested when SLOAN research into the adoption of an IPT based approach at a major bank was published recently. See: What to Expect From Agile. It has some great practical insights into some of the considerations to take into account if your organisation is thinking of adopting an agile or digital business model.