In the previous post, I talked about a not-so-glamorous aspect of a product manager’s day-to-day job. Now that you have seen the “low”, I would like to show you the “high” with another real-life example. Sit back and relax; it’s story time.
Back in the days when I was pursuing an interest on the side with a group of friends, we were working on the idea of an online marketplace. The market needs were validated. Comparing ourselves to existing competitors, it seemed like we got a shot. Everybody was pumped up about turning this idea into a reality. Platform products were, and still are, the hippest in town.
During this phase, my day was spent stationed in the school’s meeting room brainstorming with my amazing teammates. All we needed was a whiteboard, markers, and lots of water to re-hydrate ourselves after intense discussions.
We mapped out the user journey, and imagined how their current way of doing things would translate to a new way of doing things on our platform. It was exciting because we had everyone from sales, marketing, tech, design, and finance come together to define the product. This was the time when ideas took flight, creativity peaked, and the team’s energy combusted.
Like most online marketplaces, ours has two sides of users: sellers and buyers. Sellers provide services for a fee whereas buyers purchase them. An online marketplace (just like a physical one) allows buyers and sellers to discover and do business with each other. With this understanding, we needed 2 user journeys, 1 for the sellers, 1 for the buyers (illustration below). (Not long after, we realized we forgot about another user, the platform admin, who acts like the concierge or security guard of the marketplace.)
For each of the 5 activities in one user journey, we created up to a hundred of stories describing in very simple language what a user would do. An example of a user story is, as a buyer, I want to search for the cheapest service provider. Or as a seller, I want to indicate the prices of all of my services.
From this overwhelming list of user stories, we debated which ones should be focused on first, and which could wait, depending on how important they are to the users. We also discussed how to make the process of building the platform less daunting, by breaking it down into phases. For example, roll out just list and search for both sellers and buyers in phase 1, followed by issuing quotes and evaluating options in phase 2, followed by payment in phase 3, etc.
Many times, we struggled over whether we were following the right process. Many times, there was no gold standard on how to approach certain problems. There was a lot of debating, judgement calls, and trials and errors.
Hope that you have enjoyed another day in the life of a new product manager. If you find this story resemble that of a startup, your hunch is right. In case you are wondering how product management differs in a startup vs in a large, established company, follow me to the next post.
