Hard skills for Mobile Product Managers – some obvious some not so obvious

Android and iOS design guidelines

For any product manager in mobile space, it is important to have a solid handle on Android and iOS design guidelines.

If you haven’t already please make sure that you familiarize yourself with these. In order to ship apps which match the look and feel of the platform and look polished, it is important to stick to the platform guidelines. The broad strokes should match the natural rhythm of the platform – this includes key-lines, typography, color palette etc. Also important is to appreciate the differences in guidelines for the platforms and have designs forked out to cater to these differences.

Android design guidelines

iOS design guidelines

Interaction patterns library

Beyond the core design guidelines, it is also useful to have a playbook of interaction patterns for different use cases.

This corpus of interaction patterns of course will vary by platform. Some of the following links are helpful for research and exploring the problem space.

https://androiduipatterns.com

https://www.lovelyui.com/

https://pttrns.com

https://www.ui-transitions.com/

Wire-framing tools

This skill is not exclusive to mobile space. However given that a lot of designers are still ramping up when it comes to mobile design patterns, being handy with a good wire-framing tool helps communicate your ideas better.

I personally find Balsamiq the right tool for this which balances out the trade-off between presenting your idea and the macro interactions cleanly versus getting too stuck up on the fidelity of the wireframes. It helps a lot to be aware of all the nifty tips and tricks which will make you productive with this great piece of software. Here is a great free course on Udemy produced by Balsamiq guys themselves that I personally found very useful.

Prototyping tools

Of course presenting your idea is not just about individual screens, it is also about stitching the complete flow together and showcasing the various user flows.

I would stick my neck out for Invision. The learning curve is not that steep and you can quickly become very productive with this tool. 

API testing tools

Apps work off APIs and it helps to be handy with API testing tools.

Why? You ask. Well let’s say you are designing an app and you really need to understand what data points will be returned by the API and documentation is sparse. API testing tools to the rescue. SOAP UI lets you test both SOAP and REST web-services. Chrome Advanced Rest Client focuses exclusively on REST.

Charles proxy

Can’t emphasize how useful Charles is in a wide variety of situations – be it checking out the payload of the APIs, or whether your analytics tool is firing all the right events to mimicking specific responses from production by modifying http requests/responses.

Charles is the go to tool for all these scenarios. If there is one tool I can’t recommend enough, it is Charles. This will elevate you from a me too product manager to a complete pro. You will be surprised at how useful you would find this tool in so many situations.

Understanding SDKs

Understanding the notion of SDKs is key to understanding how the mobile apps space operates.

For folks who are coming from the world of shipped and installed software, this is nothing new. However those PMs who have worked in only web environments probably don’t understand this construct well enough. SDK or Software Development kits are the most natural way of distributing software to developers who can build applications on top of your software. Mostly, everything in mobile space works off an SDK. Android is an SDK and so is iOS. Want to implement Social Logins? Use the Facebook SDK.

Basic constructs of building an App

The MVP of learning the anatomy of how apps are built is “building an app with couple of screens with static content".

This exercise will pretty much help you understand most of the core concepts. There I said it, this is not more than a weekend’s work but will help you immensely.

Platform APIs for gleaning information about user's context

Familiarize yourself with important platform APIs which will help you get all the useful information that people talk about in a mobile context – location, quality of phone hardware etc. 

Understanding gaming engines

Gaming Apps are a big use case on mobile and it is quite likely that you will encounter them some time or the other in your career. The important thing to understand is that no one uses stock Android or iOS for building Gaming Apps. 

There are popular engines such as Unity, Buildbox which do all the heavy lifting and you have to just focus on getting the game play and art work right. Buildbox is in fact is a drag and drop game building software meant for audience with little or no coding experience.

Understanding Monetization

Monetizing your apps via ads means working with popular SDKs which help run ads on your app.

The key thing to note is there are broadly 3 categories of ad SDKs:

                  Network SDKs help you run ads from that specific ad network, then there are SDKs which are classically known as Supply Side Platforms in the ad tech industry. They help you source ads from more than one ad network, and improve monetization hence the name supply side platform and the third bucket are the ones which are good at a particular niche eg. Video ads.

Mobile Analytics

Mobile Analytics as you can very well imagine at this point also works off SDKs.

There are multiple analytics SDKs that vary in their capabilities and you should choose the ones that give you a good 360 view of the key metrics on mobile – Acquisition, Activation, Conversion, Retention et al. 

The images are only for illustration. Copyright for all images is acknowledged.

Did you find the article useful? Do you have other tools/tricks that you swear by? Would love to hear about them. Please comment and share and let's get a conversation going.

If you made it so far you may also like this post which talks about hard skills for PMs in a more generic context.