Product management is a very exciting task, in particular, because it works with content (languages) and online marketing hand in hand. If you are looking for a product owner (or product manager), I’m your man!
An eye for design
In a few words…
- Organization
- Conception
- Structure
- Requirements
- Communication
It may sound old-fashioned, but I do love to take a piece of paper to draft the first layout of a new product. It helps me getting a better vision of the whole product and patching up flaws faster.
Likewise, it is also a pleasant experience to do a semi-final version for the developing team with all the requirements and information they need to start making the product.
Yet, the icing on the cake is the first prototype. Having in hand something tangible you can use and test, accordingly to your own requirements, is thrilling. You can start fine-tuning the details that matter so much. You can test various color palettes, add or remove a few pixels here and there, make important features yet a bit more prominent.
Defining a user experience
In a few words…
- User experience
- Personas
- User interface
- What-if analysis
Once you have a concept in mind with a certain goal, it seems rather simple to convert it into an actual product. You want visitors to do X, then Y and Z happily. Unfortunately, visitors tend to take different paths than what you had in mind for them. That is why you must consider all possible scenarios to prevent any user from being trapped in a dead end. The biggest question is “what if?” What if the user does not log in? What if the user is on a mobile device? What if the app is used without an internet connexion? What if the user logs out during the payment? You need an answer for all these cases and many more.
Three words: testing, testing, testing
In a few words…
- Think-aloud protocol
- Data analysis
- A/B testing
- Optimization
Thinking the conception, the implementation, and the deployment of a product (a dashboard, a website, an app, etc.) is exciting, but the most adrenaline-generating moment is when actual users try out the product for the very first time. Their feedback and reactions will be the real acid test. It is also essential to put a product to the test for it to yield, one day, an aesthetic and user-friendly result. My favorite testing method is to use the “think-aloud protocol”. Get someone to use your product under real conditions and ask him to say everything that goes through their mind. You would be surprised how obvious flaws, until then invisible, suddenly become apparent.
On a larger scale, you can run A/B testing. Changing one setting of a product can have a huge impact. It can be the color of the background, the order of an item list, or the size of a button. A/B testing consists of having two versions of the same product with one (more rarely several) difference. How much this difference matters, is what we will find out after comparing the two versions on a pool of users. If version B increases your KPI by 20%, then you should be more than happy to ditch version A!