maps and skateboards: a product manager's toolkit

@CliffeHangers

Maps & SkateboardsTHE PRODUCT MANAGER’S TOOLKIT

Dave Cliffe

@CliffeHangers

Hello Dave, you’re looking well today• UWaterloo Software

Engineering ’06• 10 years as a “PM” –

Amazon, Microsoft, PagerDuty

• Ask me how good I am at project mgmt!

@CliffeHangers

What is a Product Manager?

@CliffeHangers

“”

Good companies manage Engineering. Great companies manage Product.

THOMAS SCHRANZ

@CliffeHangers

It’s not about ’Projects’

(UNLESS YOU’RE IN CONSULTING …)

@CliffeHangers

“”

At the end of the day, your job isn’t to get the requirements right — your job is to change the world.

JEFF PATTON

@CliffeHangers

@CliffeHangers

Amazon.com - 2005

The first (and last) “Technical Program Manager Intern” Goal: launch the Amazon.com Grocery business and

website

Result: the longest document I’ve ever written (100+ pages) Show design mockups of the web experience Outline the desired behavior, non-functional requirements, etc. Align the project release plans across 30+ groups in the

organization Secondary Result: ship ~6mo behind schedule

@CliffeHangers

Microsoft – thru 2009

Goal: platform adoption?

Result: wrote detailed ”Product Requirements Documents” (PRDs) Lengthy, painful review process Mostly useful for QA Became stale quickly, mostly replaced by Dev Design

doc Time-to-customer: ~9 months

@CliffeHangers

“”

No matter how good the team… if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.

WOODY WILLIAMS

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Microsoft – thru 2013

Goal: build services

Result: lots of smaller specs, sometimes linked/connected Agile but not really ‘agile’

Time-to-customer: ~4 months

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PagerDuty – circa 2014

http://servicedesignvancouver.ca/tag/double-diamond/

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PagerDuty – thru 2015

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The Lightbulbhttp://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp

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“”

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

ERIC RIES

@CliffeHangers

Striving for skateboards

Building effective skateboards

@CliffeHangers

Mapping out the path forward

Great, so you’ve built a skateboard and gathered customer feedback on it. Now what?

Problem: how can we articulate the user’s end-to-end workflow?

Problem: how do I know that this story contributes to the overall?

@CliffeHangers

User story map

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Our current process

Joint ownership: Product Owner (valuable) UX Designer (usable) Tech Lead (feasible)

Iterate with customers at multiple levels Discovery Preview/Beta Post-GA

Marty Caganhttp://www.svpg.com/

@CliffeHangers

Our current process Cross-functional engineering

Web-UI (ember.js), Web (Ruby), Services (Scala), DBs (MySQL, Cass, Kafka), Mobile (Android, iOS), Ops/DevTools (Chef, Docker, Datadog)

Devs on-call (DevOps) Leverage tools/documents to facilitate the right

conversations Business Epic one-pager – justification, value, high-level scenarios User Story Map – skateboard, possible scooters, bicycles, cars Learning Goals – qualitative interviews, quantitative usage,

*technical

@CliffeHangers

Takeaways for Building a Product

Cliffe’s additions Value the techniques

for determining need over the format of the documentation

Value customer needs over customer requests

Value usage of the product over what gets built

http://agilemanifesto.org/

@CliffeHangers

Thanks!DAVE CLIFFEDCLIFFE@PAGERDUTY.COM

Oh, by the way, we are hiringwww.pagerduty.com/jobs