The Product Book by Josh Anon & Carlos González de Villaumbrosia

Author:Josh Anon & Carlos González de Villaumbrosia [Anon, Josh & Villaumbrosia, Carlos González de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Product Manager, Product, Manager, Entrepreneurship, Product School
Publisher: Product School
Published: 2017-04-24T15:03:45+00:00

To be fair, you won’t be able to anticipate every possible obstacle, nor does anyone expect you to—that’s what iteration is about. However, as you start to build your product, there are steps you can take that will give your product the best chance of success possible. These steps start with writing a few key documents that will help you clearly establish your goals and desired outcomes, create empathy for your customers, and allow for clear communication with stakeholders. Those traits combine to help you and your team make smart decisions as you build your product, giving it the best chance of success.

Working Backwards by Imagining the Future

Building something new involves imagining the future and making it happen. We frequently find it useful to start development on a new product by describing what the world will be like when the product’s done. Imagine you’re writing a science fiction story about a near-future world with your product.

There are two great “imagine the future” documents to try writing before anyone’s written a line of code. These documents are a press release and a product review. Amazon often has its product managers write a press release when starting development. But press releases are internally focused, and they cover how you imagine talking about the product when it’s done. Writing the product review you want to receive before starting development forces you to think about how you want the product to be perceived externally when it’s done.

Both of these documents are useful to write, as they help answer key questions up front and help communicate with key stakeholders. When you start to build a new product, writing these documents forces you to take your product ideas out of your head and get them down on paper, making it much easier to share your ideas with other stakeholders. Furthermore, writing down your ideas will help ensure you have initial answers for important product questions like, “What are the key features customers will care about that we’ll want to promote?”

Over time, as you build out the product, come back to the review and the press release, and update them whenever you’re at a critical decision point. How do these documents change if you choose not to build a specific feature, for example? If you’re unhappy with how your review is changing, what can you do to get it back on a good track?

Writing an Internal Future Press Release

While not the most fun prose-wise to write, writing a press release before you start product development forces you to explicitly write down your target market, the problem you’re addressing, how you’re solving it, and the key features of the solution—succinctly, in less than a page.

Sharing the press release with stakeholders, including the engineering and design leads, will also help you start to uncover any internal barriers and figure out what questions you need to answer before the team can start fully building this product. Perhaps this product relies on building a new piece of technology, and you need the engineering team’s help to build a prototype to see if it’s even technically feasible.

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