I went into this course with one question I wanted to be answered: How do I know I’ve been a successful product manager? What are the outcomes that I should strive for, and throughout the process from ideation to the pitch deck, what are inherent/explicit measures of success to know I’ve done a good job? Would there be avenues from my team, mentors, or grading (although I’m aware this isn’t industry). Reflecting back on the first half of this course, I think that question has been satisfactorily addressed. What I’ve learned so far is that product management cannot be defined only by the competitive analyses or PRDs or any other deliverables that along the way — rather, it is an execution of both hard and soft skills that aren’t exactly taught, but learned through experience.
When I was first given my product brief, being a successful product manager to me meant perfect execution on each deliverable for all of my team’s project phases. Since we worked as a team that would do group brainstorming and then diverge on execution per assigned “task” for any particular deliverable, I would say that we all were an execution driven team which made each submission seem like a success story of its own. However, what I quickly realized was that the fruit of my learnings came from learning new processes in class and then applying them as a group. I was lucky to be in a team that had a variety of experiences that you would commonly find in a cross-functional development team — we had an AI researcher, business/product analyst experience, PM, SWE, design, etc. But what made the brainstorming sessions so memorable was how often I changed my mind whenever a new idea was brought up. Before submitting our deliverables, my team would come together to do a final run down of all members’ individual tasks and give feedback in a structured manner, and it was amazing how much I learned from my peers, not just in PM work but in soft skills as well. For group work included individual elements, we would all sit down and aim to finish the deliverables in one sitting. This allowed continuous feedback loops and productive work cycles, and I highly appreciated how responsive my teammates are to my questions. To me, this aspect of our group work made me feel like I was working in industry.
In regards to my reflection on my own work, I would’ve liked to spend more time on the user/customer research before getting to solution brainstorming. While I enjoyed the excitement of brainstorming new ideas given a product brief of a company I was excited about (it aligned with what I originally described to be my product of interest), I don’t feel like I had enough time to research or digest the problem and compare different strategies. In terms of customer research, my team and I struggled a bit with understanding what the core pain points our users faced when we assessed their usage using a competitor product (Canva). We ended up with three features as a result that resolved separate pain points, which my team decided to prioritize after (resolved!). My team did an excellent job with user interviews and we were lucky to find individuals that fit our exact target persona, but I wanted to dive into other ways we could collect user data at this point as well. If I had more time, I would also look into how to best decide on a strategy given the three in the product brief — we only briefly touched on this with our mentors. Additionally, it’d be fun to do some assumption testing ourselves (for example, usability tests on our prototype)!
