Product Management 101 - by me, Fernanda Aguiar - Post 2: The Tech Basics

Happy Tuesday, everyone!?

Today I am following with the 2/3 post about Product Management 101 by me. :)?

After next week’s post on the Basics, this one will focus on the Tech side of things and what in my opinion are the basic things a good PM should try to understand about the technology stack - separated here as Backend, Frontend and Design/UI, with a glance on Customer Success which I think is very much correlated to the latter.?

As I will share here and on most of the below sessions, in my opinion, if you want to be a good PM that goes beyond just “project management, timekeeping and organisation” as you do need to master at least the basics of all the technical topics that relate to your product and the work your team is doing. This is because without that you will not be able to effectively make decisions and have critical thoughts over all that’s being done, and worst of all you won’t be able to connect everybody else’s work to create a cohesive product that does what the customer and the business need.

1. Backend/Architecture Technical Training: understand the application #databases, how they are structured, how the tables connect to each other and then back to the core business processes; understand which 3rd party #integrations you have and how dependent you are on them; understand the critical processes and the limitations your #APIs and server #cloud setup has to have a critical opinion of when this could create problems. And of course to make sure you can critically plan this according to your budget constraints to keep track of your costs.?
2. Frontend: For frontend, make sure you understand the essentials to assess page #performance and how to relate that to #SEO; know how to assess and make sure that your tracking tools are well implemented with the segmentation you’ll then need to analyse customer behaviour; make sure you understand how this is connected with your design system and that you understand how to leverage #CMS tools to speed up recurrent content updates.?And last but not least make sure you have a responsive website.
3. Design UI/Customer Feedback/Customer Success: make sure you understand your #brand #guidelines and that your team has a #designsystem well defined and that you can assess experience consistency throughout your digital experiences in different channels. Make sure you work alongside the design team to create #testingcases when coming up with new experiences and that you get #customerfeedback as frequently as possible in a structured way - and that you have a process to frequently incorporate those #feedback items (based on priority and effort) into your backlog. Also make sure when you are brainstorming new experiences you have as much of a diverse team as possible contributing as to how that would look like, this always leads to more exhaustive and complete experiences. Also make sure you create a good relationship with #CustomerSuccess teams to make sure they know enough about the product and business to sort customers’ claims in a more accurate and useful way and bring useful feedback back to you.?

As usual, let me know about any additions and feedback! Have a great week! :)?

Cheers!