Lesson 1: – Basics of Product Management

Overview: –

This chapter is where you’ll officially start your product management journey. It is going to be comprehensive but we’ll not be discussing and explaining the fundamentals like a textbook. We’ll try look at things in details yet be a little generic with what we study since this is going to help strengthen your basics by making you all acclimatize to the world of Product Management. So if you’re here to get quick answers to crack an interview in few hours from now, I’ll suggest you look elsewhere. Here’s a link where I hope you find everything you need. Let’s start.

What is a Product?

Anything which is built and sold by a business entity or an individual which is designed with an aim to solve a problem is called a Product.

Why is a Product Built?

Products exist because Problems exists. Problems, that are either difficult to solve or are left unattended.

Problems occur & exist for various reasons and factors. It can be because of nature of things, can be limitations, environmental factors and also because of existence and operations of other products in use. Example, air pollution is caused because of IC (internal combustion) engine vehicles. (and of course other reasons as well). It’s important now to understand who is affected by Problems.

Who has problems?

EVERYONE has problems. Be it an individual or a large conglomerate. So when products are built to solve problems, the audience of affected entities is identified and classified into a strata based the type of problem, the type of audience, overall the affected entities.

Therefore, products are built and they exist to serve as a Solution for any given problem. To understand what a solution is, let’s look at a short case study where we’ll see how a business identified a problem & built a product to serve as a solution.

Case Study: – Reliance Jio, the birth of Indian Digitalization

It was 1st September of 2016, when Mukesh Ambani took the dais to launch Reliance Jio with a vision : –

A network for Indians to have highest quality & quantity of data connectivity at the most affordable prices

Mukesh Ambani

with 5 pillars: –

• Best quality broadband network
• Affordable, cutting edge devices
• Compelling apps & content
• Superior digital services experience
• Affordable and simple tariffs

With the network attributes being true 4G VoLTE.

But why? Why did Mukesh Ambani take a decision to launch a new telecommunication company in an existing saturated market dominated by then leaders like Airtel, Vodafone & Idea?

The answer is very simple. He identified a huge problem and built a product that served as a solution. Let’s look at each.

1. Problem: –

Expensive tariff plans provided by telecom companies with unjustified to poor network quality, each service to be subscribed separately at different rates and plans. All this in the world’s second most populous country which has always been price sensitive.

2. Product: –

Reliance Jio network and application suite.

3. Solution: –

A truly fast, true 4G VoLTE network at a price similar to the previously set benchmark but with value proposition worth 100X. The customer onboarding process was simplified with the use of Aadhar eKYC which led to onboarding a million customers a day.

Case Study Takeaways: –

1. At the helm of Reliance Industries, here Mukesh Ambani portrays the role of a Product Manager by building Reliance Jio.
2. The Jio network service resulted in bringing down prices of data in India, paving the path for digital revolution in India.
3. The result of Jio’s existence led to disruption of telecom industry in India.
4. Indian telecom industry today provides a bundle of services in one single tariff plan across the spectrum.

Now that we know, what a product is? why is it built? what are problems? what are solutions? Let’s understand what Product Management is.

Product Management: –

Product Management is the expertise used to build and deliver products that serve as a solution to problem(s). The expertise needed encompasses responsibilities such as: –

• Market Research
• Business Acumen
• Technology
• Defining Product Vision
• Defining Product Goals
• Product Roadmap Planning
• Roadmap Execution
• Product Release
• Continuous Improvement
• Retiring a Product

and a lot more. Expectations from organizations varies when it comes to product management.

Role of Product Managers: –

The role of Product Managers is well explained by a Venn Diagram by Martin Eriksson.

The role of Product Manager lies between Business Expertise, Technological Expertise and User Experience. Let’s understand this in detail.

1. Business: –

Product Management is primarily focused on maximizing business value from a product that would eventually yield profits for the business organization. Product Managers should be focused and obsessed towards optimizing a product that leads to achieving business goals, whatever they may be while maximizing return on investment (ROI).

2. Technology: –

The need for using technology and to what extent has always put aspiring product managers, product managers seeking a switch in organization and organizations when setting expectations from a product manager to be hired in a state of dilemma. This has led to various sub categories of product managers named as Technical Product Manager, Data Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, etc. But the essential part of a product manager’s responsibility heavily relies on being acquainted with technology if not being pragmatic. Some organizations do not expect product managers to write code while some do. Yes, it’s a fact. In the field of technology, with the rise and adoption of Agile Frameworks like Scrum, Product Managers today spend most of their time in a day by working in tandem with engineers. So it’s very important for product managers to not only be aware of underlying technology that is put in use in the product they happen to work in, but also how it can be used to solve problems when asked to build a new one.

3. User Experience: –

Unlike an engineer, who’s expected to design and build a product within the confinements of product’s requirements, a Product Manager happens to be a user within the organization to serve the user base. This means, the design decisions taken in terms of making the product easy to use while ensuring that the product operates accordingly, product managers are expected to make design decisions that ensure product is easier to use.

So to summarize Lesson 1, we studied: –

1. Basics of Product and Product Management
2. Dug deep by looking at a small case study around a successful product built and in use today
3. Took a look at roles and responsibilities of Product Managers.

From the next chapter, we’ll design a use case for a product. This may be aimed to solve an existing problem or be part of an existing ecosystem where there exists a product that solves a problem where we’ll enter as a competitor. We will use this product as a guiding point for use as we develop the product along the way. I would appreciate & take inputs from you, so if you have something in mind which can be this use case, do leave a comment here or on LinkedIn and we can engage in a discussion around it.