In this lecture, we'll discuss the criticality of understanding the market problems you'd like to solve before beginning to design your product. We discuss separating the problem and solutions spaces, how to capture problem statements, and validating problems.

The Piles of Product Management Part 2

The episodes in this podcast form a course covering the most essential concepts and practices related to tech product management. The first (oldest) lecture is an introduction followed by other lectures in logical order. The lectures are a subset of an online course offered by career.pm. Please send any questions or comments to team@career.pm.

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Planning and delivering product releases is what keeps most PMs busy most of the time. In this lecture, we'll define what a release is, talk about release types and governance, discuss scope in terms of an MVP (minimum viable product) and more.

Release Planning Part 1

Value propositions are an expression of the value you promise to deliver to the market with your product. In this lecture, we'll talk about the concept of customer value, discuss how to capture value propositions, and explore how they are used to create marketing messages. You can learn more about the first template we describe in the Positioning Statement section of this article (note that we don't cover the last sentence {positioning}) of the template described there.

Value Propositions

In this lecture, we'll address requirements management. For those more comfortable with Agile/Scrum-like terms, think of it as capturing user stories. We first define what a requirement is and contrast it with the term "feature". We then discuss types of requirements, the sources of requirements, and what makes a good requirement.

Managing Product Requirements

In this lecture, we'll talk about a critical accountability of all PMs: defining your product's strategy. We will define strategy as part of a broader "business motivation" as defined in the Object Management Group's Business Motivation Model. You should first define the "ends" you would like to achieve, i.e., how you'll measure the success of your product, and then define how you'll get there. You can read more about the Business Motivation Model in the OMG spec: https://www.omg.org/spec/BMM/About-BMM/

Product Strategy (Business Motivation)

In this lecture, we explore "market segments", which are cohorts within a market that share similar requirements or priorities. Most product managers do an insufficient job of segmenting the market they serve and are thus unable to optimally focus engineering investment and sales and marketing spend. Understanding segments and their criticality to your product is one of the traits that separates average PMs from the greats!

The Piles of Product Management Part 2

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